There are No Grey Areas in Taxation Law - Jaitley in NACEN
FINANCE Minister Arun Jaitley addressed the new recruits of the 68th batch of IRS at the National Academy of Customs, Excise and Narcotics (NACEN), Faridabad. Interestingly when everybody has forgotten about the proposed mega campus of NACEN at Hindupur in Andhra Pradesh, the FM mentioned it in detail in his address. The FM also said, "We have lived through the last seven decades with an impression that if avoidance could be done of government revenue, there was nothing immoral or improper about it. That was considered to be commercial smartness."
After the meeting, the FM tweeted, "I have read several inaccurate versions of my speech delivered today at NACEN in the Media."
But an important observation he made was totally ignored by the media. He told the probationers,
"You are a service that has been trusted with a very unusual job. You investigate and then you pass quasi judicial orders. Ordinarily in the world of jurisprudence these are separate functions. Somebody has to investigate and somebody else has to adjudicate. Whether that is fair or not but the fact that here you don the cap of an investigator and an adjudicator, actually mean that your own standards of fairness will also have to be very high because a citizen, as I said, must pay what he is supposed to pay but at the same time must not be subjected to any unlawful extraction of what he is not supposed to pay. And therefore the level of fairness that you are able to follow will also determine what is the quality of the orders that you pass."
He could have said this as well to the senior officers of the department. At least, the Board should circulate this among all the adjudicators of the department. Maybe they don't teach these things in NACEN.
Mr Jaitley further told the probationers,
There are no grey areas in taxation law. It is either white or black. Either a tax is payable or a tax is not payable. And therefore to discover grey areas in fiscal laws is not possible. You interpret the law as it is without adding or subtracting a word. That is the primary responsibility of the tax person. And I think one of the objectives behind the establishment of these academies is not merely a formal training period which a person must undergo before entering service.
Always remember credibility and fairness along with efficiency and hard work are always the guiding factors in your career.