Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee today asked the Income Tax (I-T) department to keep unmindful litigation in courts in check by revisiting its legal and judicial system.
He said the department was filing appeals in a routine manner, without careful thought and examination, leading to the department earning the dubious distinction of being the biggest litigant in the government.
"One area of concern is litigation with taxpayers… I have noticed some of the appeals filed by the department have been dismissed by courts on account of gross delays. These issues require a relook at system of legal and judicial management," Mukherjee said. He was speaking at the 150th anniversary of the Income Tax in India.
The finance minister said a lot more remained to be done as the department needed to reinvent itself to meet the challenges of the next 50 years. He said it should concentrate on its core functions of data mining, risk profiling and risk-assessment, tax enforcement and recovery, dispute resolution and grievance redressal, taxpayer awareness and education, and other administrative, judicial, audit and Parliament-related functions.
"The department also needs to strengthen its administrative structure, including its headquarters, to enable it to undertake greater responsibilities. It needs to evolve functionally to cater to highly specialised and new areas of work," he said.
The finance minister acknowledged that the I-T department, with a customer base of 3.5 crore taxpayers and 10 crore PAN holders, needed huge resources for manpower, infrastructure and communications systems. He agreed there was a strong case for increasing the manpower and material resources of the department.
With reference to the statement that "the department was filing appeals in a routine manner, without careful thought and examination", it may be pointed out that unless an appeal is filed on any legal issue on which the I. T. Department is already on appeal, in any other ongoing case, the needle of suspicion would be pointed on the Commissioner, who decides not to file the appeal. The legal issue in the "other ongoing case' may not be exactly similar and the case may be pending before the Tribunals, High Courts or Supreme Court (SC). The verdict of SC is only the law of the land, as per article 141 of our Constitution. The conclusion is that backlog of undecided cases itself is one of the main reasons for "filing appeals in a routine manner."
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Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee today asked the Income Tax (I-T) department to keep unmindful litigation in courts in check by revisiting its legal and judicial system.
