Two registrations that quietly moved to March, and the forms that changed with them

Two of the quieter transitions in the Income-tax Act, 2025 are the ones that decide who may value an asset and who may appear for a taxpayer. Both carried a 30 September 2026 cut-off. Both were moved, in a notification issued the fortnight before it fell.

What moved

Notification No. 120/2026 of 17 September 2026 — the Income-tax (Fourth Amendment) Rules, 2026 — pushes two registration cut-offs from 30 September 2026 to 31 March 2027:

• rule 246(4) — registration of valuers
• rule 256(4) — registration of authorised income-tax practitioners

It also substitutes Form No. 169 and Form No. 171, the application forms for the two routes. If you downloaded either before mid-September, you have the wrong one.

A detail worth noticing in the commencement clause: rules 2 to 4 are deemed to have come into force on 1 April 2026, while rules 5 to 8 take effect on publication. The deadline change is in rules 5 and 6 — so this is an extension that began when it was published, not one backdated to cover a gap.

Why a six-month extension is the interesting part

Deadlines get extended because people are not meeting them. A transition that carries an existing professional registration across to a new Act is not difficult work; it is a form and a set of particulars. An extension of six months on something that simple usually means one of two things: the people it applies to do not know it applies to them, or they do not believe it matters yet.

Both are worth checking in your own firm this week rather than in March.

Who it covers

This is the part to read in the rules rather than take from anyone's summary, including this one. The descriptions in circulation are:

• for practitioners, persons registered under the Income-tax Act, 1961 holding a valid registration as at 31 March 2026;
• for valuers, those registered under the Wealth-tax Act, 1957, updating their particulars to continue as valuers under section 514.

Those two are not in conflict, but neither is the rule text. If someone in your firm relies on either registration, open rule 246(4) and rule 256(4) and match the words to the person, because this is a question about an individual's standing and not one to settle from a blog post.

What the notification does not say

It does not say what happens to a registration that is not carried across by 31 March 2027. It moves a date; it attaches no stated consequence. That silence should be read as silence — the sensible planning assumption is that the right does not survive unregistered, but the notification does not say so, and nobody should be told that it does.

One unrelated change in the same notification

The same amendment is reported to remove the arrest provision from the recovery rules (rule 225). It has nothing to do with registration and is mentioned here only because practitioners reading Notification 120/2026 for one reason will find the other in it, and a change to recovery powers is not something to skim past.

The practical version

Three things, none of which takes long:

• Identify who in the firm holds either registration. It is usually one or two people and often nobody has thought about it since the Act changed.
• Download Form 169 or Form 171 again. Both were substituted in September; an application on the old form is an application you will make twice.
• Do it well before March. A deadline already extended once is not a deadline anybody should expect to be extended twice.