An addition for unexplained investment cannot be sustained...

An addition for unexplained investment cannot be sustained unless the investment was made in the financial year immediately preceding the relevant assessment year. Here, the ledger accounts and year-wise expenditure charts showed that the opening work-in-progress consisted of expenditure incurred over several earlier years, and the Revenue itself treated it as a prior-period balance. The Assessing Officer could not tax that historical investment in the current year merely because earlier returns were filed on a non-business basis or because prior disclosure was allegedly incomplete. The addition under Section 69 was therefore unsustainable and was deleted.

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