Inform the Status of previous cases - Court asks Income Tax Department
The Bombay High Court has noticed that appeals are filed in respect of the same assessees on the same issues for different years and the Department is not able to tell the court either the Appeal Numbers or as to what the decisions were. There is every possibility of the Court giving different judgements on the same issues for different years.
Recently we brought to you a judgement of the Supreme Court where the Department's Counsel pleaded that the Central Excise Department's appeal in the Sri Chakra case ( CUM DUTY) was pending in the Supreme Court. The judges pointed out to the Counsel that the Department's appeal was dismissed six years ago! [ ]
Apparently, neither of the Revenue Boards has a record of the appeals and what happened to those appeals. Two years ago TIOL was invited for a presentation before the CBEC and they asked me if TIOL can provide a present status for the appeals before the Supreme Court and High Courts and even the Tribunal decisions. I told the Board that we would be happy to provide the service, but the information has to come from the Board - we can only upload the information but certainly cannot collect it. I suggested to the Board that they can collect the information from the Commissioners and we can prepare a data bank on the latest status of every case and this would make work easy for the Department, the courts, the litigant lawyer and the assessee. Today many of the Commissionerates waste a lot of time in corresponding with other Commissionerates to find out the status of cases.
Now the Bombay High Court has asked the Income Tax Department to do exactly that. The High Court judgement said,
For the past six months it has come to our notice and we have been repeatedly pointing out that though the appeals are filed in respect of the same assessee on the same questions for different assessment years when matters come up for hearing, Counsel for the appellant are not in a position to inform this Court either of the numbers of the appeal or what has happened.
The Income Tax Officer must maintain a record of all the appeals with their numbers which they have preferred and the status of these appeals. If a system of maintaining such records has not been so far prepared in respect of each assessee, the same should be done immediately and a compliance report be filed in this Court within two weeks from today of the steps that are being taken so that valuable judicial time is saved.
Let us hope that at least now, the judicial decision will make both the Boards to maintain this very badly needed record which they should have started maintaining at least 50 years ago. And TIOL would be only too glad to assist the Boards in this task - if only they are willing to share information.
Click here for the judgement .