Will CBEC change its style of issuing notifications?
THE Supreme Court judgement comes as a jolt to the relaxed and casual style of the Board. They usually issue notifications late in the evening after everybody has left office. And they assume that notifications are effective from 00.00 hours of the day. When goods are cleared at 11 am, how on earth are the importers or for that matter the officers to guess that Board will come out with a notification late in the evening?
A Law is a Law only when you make people aware of it. How can you enforce a law in the morning that you enacted only in the evening? The culture and arrogance of retrospectively taxing the unsuspecting taxpayer is the culprit. They forget that only Parliament has the power to legislate retrospectively, not the Board. But some babus think that they are above Parliament, because all the laws passed by parliament are actually written by them.
Sometime back a senior lawyer was arguing in a Tribunal that the definition given in the Act has no meaning. The president of the Tribunal said that it was a law passed by Parliament and we should assume that Parliament does not pass laws for fun. The senior advocate said, “what Parliament, this is drafted by some under secretary!." The President sagely advised, “You should see the end product, not the origin - even though it was drafted by an under secretary, it has undergone scrutiny at several stages and has finally got parliamentary approval. All modern laws are drafted by bureaucrats… after all, you were also once a junior lawyer."
As per the Law, notification is to be published and offered for sale on the date of its issue by the Directorate of Publicity and Public Relations.
Does the Directorate of Publicity and Public Relations ever publish a notification or offer it for sale. If they don't, are the notifications invalid?
Now that the Supreme Court has held that the Notification is valid only from the date it is published and offered for sale, will the Board ensure that notifications are published and offered for sale on the date of its issue by the Directorate of Publicity and Public Relations? Or will they change the law? Or will the field officers deny exemption and ask assessees to produce proof of publication by the Directorate? Is the Board not required to mention in its web site where this all-important Directorate is and how one can buy a notification from them? Will the Directorate advertise when a notification is published and available for sale?
The whole problem started with mentioning this Directorate in the Act. Wasn't it a sacrilege that they made Parliament to pass such a law? And now that has turned against them. Law making is certainly too serious an affair to be left to inexperienced babus - experienced babus don't read.