The Madras High Court held that the assessee was entitled to file a declaration under the Direct Tax Vivad Se Vishwas Act, 2020, since the definition of \u201cappellant\u201d in S. 2(1)(a)(i) expressly includes the filing of a writ petition. The assessee had challenged the Chief CIT\u2019s order rejecting waiver of interest by filing a writ petition, which was pending on the \u201cspecified date\u201d under the Act, and therefore the dispute relating to \u201ctax arrears\u201d (which includes disputed interest) was eligible for settlement under S. 3. The Court observed that writ proceedings in peculiar circumstances may partake the character of an appeal for the purposes of the Act. It was further held that CBDT clarifications\/FAQ relied upon by the Department were not binding on the Court and could not override the statutory definition. Accordingly, the rejection of the declaration was unsustainable and the respondents were directed to process the assessee\u2019s application dated 29 January 2021 in accordance with law under Ss. 3 and 5 of the DTVSV Act. (AY. 1995-96 to 1997-98)(SJ)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Direct Tax Vivad Se Viswas Act , 2020. <\/p>\n
S. 2(1)(a) : Declarant \u2013 Rejection of declaration \u2013 Pendency of writ petition treated as pendency of appeal \u2013 Tax arrears \u2013 CBDT FAQ\/Circular not binding on Court \u2013 Declaration under DTVSV Act maintainable \u2013 Application directed to be processed. [S. 2(1)(h), 2(1)(j), 2(1)(o), 3, Art. 226]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-income-tax-act"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9S2Rw-fdl","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58487"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58488,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58487\/revisions\/58488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}