Practice area · Income Tax
The 2025 Act renumbered almost everything. Cite the wrong section in an opinion and it shows. Get the position under both Acts, tied to the exact provision and case law.
Income tax in India is levied under the Income-tax Act, 1961 and the new Income-tax Act, 2025, covering the taxation of individuals, firms and companies. AskSolique answers income-tax questions with the precise section, rule and judicial authority cited - and maps the old and new provisions side by side.
Income tax is the highest-volume advisory work most desks do - residential status, TDS, capital gains and deductions, every day - and now also where the 1961-to-2025 transition puts every section number in motion.
Why Income Tax is hard
Income tax is a six-decade accretion of amendments, provisos, circulars and thousands of judgments interpreting each line. Residential status turns on a precise day-count with carve-outs for citizens and high earners; TDS has a different rate and condition for every kind of payment; capital gains splits by asset class and holding period; deductions come loaded with provisos that decide whether they apply at all. The section alone rarely settles it - the controlling reading usually lives in the Tribunal or High Court decision that qualifies it.
What's broken in the way you work today
Almost every provision was renumbered in 2025. Muscle-memory citations to the 1961 numbers are now wrong, and there is no built-in map warning you.
Ask a chatbot whether a deduction or exemption applies and it returns a fluent yes or no, skipping the proviso or condition that actually decides the answer - and reads exactly like a correct one.
The right answer often turns on a Tribunal or High Court ruling that qualifies the section. Finding the controlling case, and whether it still holds, is the slow part.
Because no one is sure which Act the client expects, routine advice gets escalated or re-verified, adding delay to work the team could own.
What happens if nothing changes
In income-tax work, the exposure is twofold. A substantively wrong position - a mis-read deduction, a missed TDS, a wrong capital-gains treatment - flows into the return and surfaces as demand, interest and penalty on assessment, often years later. And a citation to a superseded section number quietly erodes the one thing an advisor sells: authority. Doing nothing means shipping opinions that are either exposed on the merits or dated on their face, on the highest-volume advisory work you do.
What has to change
Stop reasoning from a single stale copy of the Act and stop treating the bare section as the answer. The position should arrive with the exact provision, every condition and proviso that qualifies it, and the controlling judicial authority - from a corpus maintained as the Act and the case law move.
Genuine use cases
Real fact patterns from direct-tax work. Each returns the position with the exact provision and, where it matters, the 1961 ↔ 2025 mapping.
CLIENT MEETING
The client wants the entire loan interest deducted. AskSolique confirms Sec 24(b) allows it in full, then flags the Sec 71(3A) cap on setting off the resulting loss - the number the client actually gets.
Cited to Sec 24(b) & Sec 71(3A), IT Act 1961
WITHHOLDING DESK
Before the payment goes out, AskSolique confirms Sec 195 applies, pulls the applicable DTAA rate, and lists the TRC and Form 10F the vendor still needs to furnish.
Cited to Sec 195, IT Act 1961
M&A DESK
Promoters ask if the swap triggers capital-gains tax now. AskSolique works through the exchange, the cost of acquisition carried forward, and the conditions that keep the scheme tax-neutral - before the term sheet is signed.
Cited to Sec 47, IT Act 1961
Time saved goes straight to the judgment calls that need a partner, not a timesheet.
A deduction or exemption comes back with the proviso and condition that actually governs it, and the 1961/2025 numbering side by side where the transition matters.
Answers carry the controlling Tribunal, High Court or Supreme Court authority, not just the bare section.
Routine questions - residential status, TDS, deductions - come back cited and ready to sign, without escalation.
Every conclusion traces to the exact provision and authority - the kind of position you can defend in a scrutiny reply.
A quick check, a multi-part question, a full scenario - each comes back with the exact provision cited.
Is interest on a home loan for a let-out property fully deductible?
An Indian citizen who worked abroad for several years returned to India part-way through the tax year, with foreign-company RSUs vesting before and after the move - determine the person's residential status, the Indian tax treatment and sourcing of each vest, and any foreign-tax-credit or disclosure obligations.
Two listed companies are merging through a share swap - shareholders of the transferor get shares in the transferee, no cash changes hands, and the transferee also carries forward the transferor's accumulated losses and unabsorbed depreciation. Work through whether the swap is tax-neutral for shareholders, the cost of acquisition they carry forward, and the conditions the merger has to satisfy for the transferee to inherit those losses.
Start free, bring a real matter, and see the answer come back cited to the exact source. No card, no demo call.