Do the Finance Bill and the enacted Schedule state the same rates?

They do. Four sources, every figure agreeing — which establishes the rates were not altered between introduction and assent.

Outcome

Established

Published

28 August 2026

Question fixed

25 August 2026· stated by us, not proven

What came back.

They do, for every figure checked. Four sources, no disagreement — which establishes something stronger than any one of them supports alone: the rates were not altered between introduction and assent. One quantity is the exception and is reported separately below rather than folded in.

Independent sources: 4
Disagreements found: 0
Rate tables reconciled: 3 — general, senior, super-senior
Surcharge tiers reconciled: 4
Figures verified in the ENACTED text: All but one
The exception: The cess — stated in the Act’s body, not in the Schedule

The system under test.

The Income-tax Act says what is taxed; a separate annual Act says at what rate. Every downstream computation depends on those figures, and the version most software is built from is the one circulating before enactment. Whether a rate moved between introduction and assent is therefore a question with real consequences and a definite answer.

Source A: The Finance Bill as introduced — the instrument itself, but pre-enactment
Source B: The enacted First Schedule, plain typesetting
Source C: The enacted First Schedule, official gazette typesetting
Source D: The department’s post-enactment rate card — post-assent, but not the instrument
Figures compared: Slab thresholds and rates under both regimes, senior and super-senior tables, four surcharge tiers, the surcharge cap on certain income, and the cess

The stated constraints

S1Every figure is read from the instrument itself, not from a summary of it
S2Each figure is compared across at least two documents with opposite weaknesses
S3A figure verified in one source and not the other is reported separately, not levelled up
S4A document is identified by its own heading before anything is taken from it

The second instrument.

Independence is a claim. The table below is the evidence for it — including the two things that ARE shared.

First instrument

The Bill as introduced

Read line by line: the charging sections that bind each tax year to its Act, and the Schedule paragraphs that state the rates.

Second instrument

The enacted Schedule, in two independent renderings, plus the department’s own rate card

Two separately typeset versions of the enacted Schedule were read and compared figure by figure against the Bill and against each other. The department’s post-enactment card is a fourth source whose weakness is the opposite of the Bill’s — it is after assent but is not the instrument.

Shared?	What	Note
Not shared	Publisher	The Bill and the gazette Schedule come from different publishing bodies. The rate card comes from a third.
Not shared	Typesetting	The two Schedule renderings differ in layout, pagination and column structure, so a transcription error in one is unlikely to be reproduced in the other.
Not shared	Point in time	Two sources are pre-assent and two are post-assent. That is the whole design: agreement across the boundary is what the check turns on.
Shared	The underlying enactment	All four describe one Act. If the enacted text itself is wrong, four sources agree on the error and this method cannot see it.
Shared	The reader	One person read all four. A misreading repeated across sources would look like agreement.

The reasoning

Five steps, each checkable without a computer.

This is the part that does not require you to trust the solver.

01The rates are not in the Income-tax Act at all.The Act charges tax at the rates some other annual Act specifies. So the question "what is the rate" is always a question about the Finance Act, and the Act itself cannot settle it.

02One instrument charges two tax years under two different Acts.Separate charging sections point at separate parts of the same Schedule — one part for the year governed by the older Act, another for the year governed by the newer one. There is no blending, and reading the wrong part is the obvious way to get a plausible wrong answer.

03Each figure was compared against a source with the opposite weakness.The Bill is the instrument but precedes assent. The rate card follows assent but is not the instrument. Neither alone can establish that nothing moved; together they can.

04Two renderings of the enacted Schedule agree with each other and with the Bill.Different typesetting, same figures. That closes the transcription risk which a single rendering would leave open.

05The cess is the honest exception and is not levelled up.It is stated in the body of the Act, and the enacted documents obtained are the Schedule only. So it is verified in the Bill and against the rate card, and NOT in the enacted text — recorded per figure rather than as a single claim about the year, because a year-level flag would be wrong in both directions at once.

What this does not settle.

It establishes agreement, not correctness.: If the enacted Schedule itself contains an error, all four sources reproduce it and this check reports agreement.
The cess was not read in the enacted text.: It carries weaker provenance than every other figure here and is labelled that way rather than being carried by the strength of its neighbours.
Only the figures a computation actually uses were checked.: The Schedule is much larger than this comparison. Nothing is claimed about the paragraphs that were not read.
One reader, four documents.: A consistent misreading would present as agreement. This is the weakest joint and a second reader is the only thing that closes it.
Two of the files supplied for this check were not what their names said.: One was an earlier year’s Schedule entirely, identified only by reading its own heading. That was caught — but it is evidence that filename-level trust is worth nothing here.

What would change the conclusion.

A figure differing between the Bill and either enacted rendering would settle the question the other way immediately, and would be the more valuable finding.
Obtaining the enacted text of the Act’s body would move the cess to the same footing as everything else.
A second reader reproducing the comparison independently would close the single-reader limit.
A subsequent amending Act moves any of these figures and makes this entry historical rather than current — which is why it carries a date and not a claim about the present.

Artifacts

identifiedThe figure-by-figure comparison table: Every quantity, the four sources, and what each states. Identified by content hash; not yet published as a downloadable file.
identifiedThe source documents: All four are public documents published by the government of India. They are not republished here — the entry cites where each is obtained rather than mirroring copies whose provenance a reader could not then verify.
unavailableThird-party reproduction: Nobody outside ProServiq has re-run this comparison.

Revisions

28 Aug 2026
Published.

A corrected figure stays in the record. Silently fixing one would make every other figure unverifiable.

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