Cost of acquisition rules: cutoff date advanced, altering use of prior fair market value for long-term capital assets.
Amendment to section 55 advances the statutory cut-off date used to compute cost of acquisition and cost of improvement for long-term capital assets: where an asset was acquired before the new cut-off date, its cost of acquisition is to be treated as the asset's value on that cut-off date and cost of improvement is recognised only if incurred after that date, with fair market value at the cut-off date available as the basis. The amendment is effective from 1st April, 2018 and applies to the assessment year 2018-2019 onwards.