Another Amnesty Scheme, Please - Let's not carry litigation legacy to GST
IN Central Excise and Customs alone there are lakhs of cases pending from the level of Assistant Commissioners right up to the Supreme Court of India. It takes about a year or two for an Assistant Commissioner to decide a case, then another year for the first appellate stage, three to six years for the Tribunal and five to ten years for the higher courts. Sometimes by the time a case is decided by the highest court, the issue is no more relevant!
They say, in a war the first casualty is Truth. It is true of many of our legal battles. A lot of money, time and paper are wasted in thousands of pending cases at various levels. Tons and tons of printed orders are delivered often repeating the same old decided cases, sometimes overruling, sometimes distinguishing, sometimes just referring and almost always surely confusing everybody.
Reports are published that thousands of crores are locked up in court cases. Actually this figure is highly exaggerated. Every rupee locked up in litigation is not revenue. Actually what we may ultimately get is only a fraction of the amount under litigation and that too after years of agonising court room battles and may be a little retrospective legislation!
DDT suggests a new amnesty scheme:
++ Ask the litigants to pay just ten percent of the duty/tax demanded and give them total immunity from all liabilities pertaining to that case. Cases pending at all levels should be covered in the scheme.
There should be a Samadhan within the department also as follows:-
++ As a onetime measure, close all the provisional assessments ordered before 1.1.2010 with absolutely no liability on either side.
++ Treat all the existing Audit paras, both internal and AG's as closed. Simply destroy all the audit files.
++ In all cases booked, if Show Cause Notices are not issued within six months from the date of seizure/detection, return all the seized goods and records with no liability to the assessee. Destroy all the case records.
++ Do away with the five year limitation for demands for the past five years. The five year period should apply prospectively from 1.4.2010.
Our offices and courts will have a better look with all those mountains of paper destroyed and with better looking officers having no worry about those pending arrears and audit objections.
This may make a lot of consultants lose their work, but consistency and clarity are far more important than consultancy.
And let us enter the GST era with a clean slate – let us not carry this stinking mountain of litigation into the GST era