Central Taxes – There should be a Central Court
CENTRAL Excise, Customs, Service Tax, Income Tax – all these central taxes are highly litigation prone and we have two reasonably efficient Tribunals- CESTAT and ITAT, but the next stage of litigation takes a strange path. The Tribunal's decisions are appealable to the jurisdictional High Courts and when different High Courts pronounce different verdicts, there are strange problems. A manufacturer may have two units under the jurisdiction of two High Courts and if the two Courts have given two different judgements on the same issue, the same manufacturer may have to follow two different orders for his two units. This is illogical and unwarranted. The Tribunals have Larger Benches whose decisions should be made applicable all over India, but a High Court can strike down even the decision of a Larger Bench. It is also possible that one High Court may uphold the Larger Bench decision while another High Court may set aside the same decision.
The National Tax Tribunal would have been perhaps the best answer, but it is in such a cold storage that everybody has just forgotten about it!
To cut down on litigation and uncertainty, we should make the Larger Bench equal to the High Court and the appeal against the LB/SB decision should lie to the Supreme Court only. If necessary it can be made mandatory that the Larger Bench should be presided by a sitting or retired Chief Justice of a High Court.
Have mercy on the poor assessee who has to go through the Assessing Officer, Commissioner (Appeals), Tribunal, Larger Bench of the Tribunal, High Courts and then Supreme Court – and if by chance, he wins, he may have to face a retrospective amendment! Should Justice delivery system be so tortuous?