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Corporate Tax Advisory
Tax planning on transactions, group reorganisations and capital structure, including the minimum alternate tax position, carry forward of losses and the implications of the chosen holding structure.
We advise companies, founders and cross-border groups on direct tax through the full cycle, the position taken in the return, the documentation that defends it, the assessment that tests it and the appeal that settles it. The work that wins an appeal is done long before the notice arrives.
A direct tax mandate is a chain of decisions that have to hold together. The position in the return must match the documentation, the documentation must answer the assessment, and the assessment must be defensible on appeal.
Tax planning on transactions, group reorganisations and capital structure, including the minimum alternate tax position, carry forward of losses and the implications of the chosen holding structure.
Benchmarking, contemporaneous documentation, the accountant report and representation in transfer pricing assessments, with advance pricing arrangements where certainty is worth the process.
Withholding tax on domestic and overseas payments, lower deduction certificates, and the interaction of the Act with the relevant Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement.
Treaty interpretation, permanent establishment exposure, beneficial ownership and the residence and source questions that decide which country may tax a stream of income.
Responses to scrutiny notices, representation through the faceless assessment and faceless appeal scheme, and the management of the record that the assessment is built on.
Appeals before the Commissioner (Appeals), the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal and onward references and appeals to the High Court and the Supreme Court.
Each stage produces the record the next stage relies on. The advice fixes the position, the documentation defends it, and the appeal closes it. Nothing is improvised at the notice stage.
Fix the characterisation and the tax position on the transaction before it is reported, and record the reasoning.
Build the contemporaneous record, agreements, benchmarking and disclosures, that the position depends on.
Respond to scrutiny and faceless assessment with a complete, consistent and timely submission.
Carry the matter to the Commissioner (Appeals) and the Tribunal on a focused set of grounds.
Pursue or defend references and appeals to the High Court and the Supreme Court where a question of law remains.
Every direct tax position is read through three lenses at once. The number has to be technically correct, the position has to make commercial sense for the business, and the whole of it has to be legally defensible the day an assessing officer opens the file.
We fix the characterisation, the computation and the documentation first, the head of income, the deductions, the withholding and the transfer pricing record, so the number in the return is supportable line by line under the Income Tax Act, 1961.
We weigh the tax outcome against the commercial purpose, because a position that saves tax but cannot be explained as a genuine business arrangement invites the anti-abuse rules. The structure has to make sense before it saves anything.
We build the position for the assessment and the appeal it may face, aligning treaty claims, beneficial ownership and disclosure so the file holds together from the faceless assessment through the Tribunal and the courts.
Most tax disputes are lost on the record, not on the law. A position that was sound when taken fails because the documentation was thin or inconsistent. We prepare the file at the time of the transaction for the moment it is examined, which is always later and always less forgiving.
The vocabulary that decides outcomes, set out precisely, not loosely.
The reassessment power that lets the tax department reopen an assessment where income is alleged to have escaped assessment, now governed by the reworked Sections 147 to 151 and the Section 148A enquiry.
The electronic, jurisdiction-less assessment scheme under Section 144B in which scrutiny is conducted without a physical interface between the taxpayer and the assessing unit.
The arm length pricing of international and specified domestic transactions between associated enterprises under Sections 92 to 92F, tested through methods such as TNMM and CUP.
The three-member panel under Section 144C that hears objections of eligible assessees, including foreign companies, against a draft assessment order before it is finalised.
Tax deducted at source under Chapter XVII-B, where the payer withholds tax on specified payments and deposits it against the recipient liability.
Short, direct, on the record.
It should be prepared contemporaneously, meaning while the relevant year is current and the facts are fresh, not reconstructed when a notice arrives. The law expects the benchmarking, the functional analysis and the accountant report to reflect the position as it stood when the international transaction took place. Documentation built after the fact is both harder to defend and easier for an assessing officer to discount, so the discipline of preparing it on time is itself part of the defence.
Where India has a Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement with another country, a taxpayer may generally choose the more beneficial of the treaty and the Act for the income concerned. The treaty does not apply automatically to every fact pattern. It turns on residence, on the existence of a permanent establishment, on beneficial ownership of the income and on the specific article that governs the stream, and it is subject to the anti-abuse provisions. We read the treaty and the Act together before a position is taken.
The faceless scheme removes the physical interface with a jurisdictional officer and conducts assessment and first appeal through a centralised, written process. In practice this raises the weight of the written submission and the documentary record, because there is no hearing in which to explain a thin file. It also makes timelines strict. A complete, internally consistent and well evidenced response, filed on time, is now the whole of the case at that stage.
A dispute typically moves from the assessing officer to the Commissioner (Appeals), then to the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal, which is the final fact finding authority. From there a question of law can be carried to the jurisdictional High Court and, in a fit case, to the Supreme Court. Because the Tribunal is the last forum that decides facts, the factual record built at assessment and first appeal usually determines the outcome of everything that follows.
In defined situations, yes. An advance ruling can be sought on certain questions, and transfer pricing certainty can be obtained through an advance pricing arrangement, which fixes the methodology for future years and can roll back to earlier ones. These routes trade time and disclosure for certainty, and they are worth pursuing where the amounts are material and the recurring nature of the transaction justifies the process.
Merger filings, dominance, cartels and CCI proceedings
Economic offences, PMLA, SEBI enforcement and internal investigations
Civil, commercial, writ and appellate proceedings across the courts
The strongest outcomes are built into the strategy at the start, not recovered from disputes later.