Dismissing the appeals of the revenue, the Court held that in an appeal under section 260A of the Act, it was not for the court to sit in appeal over the factual findings unless a case of perversity is made out. The Tribunal had adverted to the facts of each of the cases in some detail and, based on the facts, which were not even disputed by the Departmental representative, drew a reasonable and, in fact, the correct inference that the prior approvals under section 153D were the product of total non-application of mind. Accordingly, the appeals involved no substantial questions of law. Court held that \u00a0the approvals granted by the Additional Commissioner in this case were indeed vitiated by total non-application of mind, and the Tribunal had not exceeded its jurisdiction or acted with any perversity in quashing such approvals or holding that action under section 153A of the Act was incompetent, being based upon such vulnerable approvals, because, the Department’s contention that the Tribunal has referred to the infirmities only in respect of four to five cases was not accurate. The four to five instances, apart from covering several appeals out of this batch, were only illustrative of the extent to which the approval orders were granted without any application of mind. A chart was prepared and produced by the assessee which reflected that the approvals were rushed through, and, at least in the facts and circumstances of the present case, this was correctly held by the Tribunal to constitute a complete lack of application of mind. In several cases, the proposal was submitted to the approving authority at 5.02 p. m., yet the approvals were issued on the same day. The proposals were accompanied by draft orders that set out diverse facts and issues. Besides the glaring discrepancies in such draft orders, such as the fact that the draft assessment order mentioned purported to be for years when the company was not even incorporated, the Tribunal, quite correctly, found it difficult to believe that the Additional Commissioner could have considered all such proposals and the accompanying draft assessment orders within a few minutes or even a couple of hours, as was claimed in these cases. The so-called “discussions” between the official seeking approval and the Additional Commissioner could not replace proper approvals that demonstrate application of mind or even a basicreasoning process that might indicate some level of consideration. It was too much to accept that the Additional Commissioner, in a matter of minutes or, at the most, a few hours, could have read, let alone applied his mind to the cases, and issued the approvals. The draft orders that were supposed to accompany the approval proposals already included the dates and numbers of the approval orders that had yet to be issued. This glaring inconsistency showed that the approval was a foregone conclusion even before the proposal and draft orders were received by the Additional Commissioner, or that the authorities considered the mandatory approval a trivial formality subject to casual compliance. Such a glaring discrepancy remained unexplained, and was sought to be downplayed. The discrepancies were not, by any means, insignificant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
S. 153A: Assessment-Search-Approval of prescribed authority-Approvals in 30 cases rushed through on same day Difficult to believe that Additional Commissioner considered all proposals and accompanying draft assessment orders within a few minutes or even a couple of hours-Approval need not resemble reasoned decision-But should reflect minimal application of mind-Absence of valid and prior approval vitiates assessment-Non-application of mind-Tribunal right in quashing assessments-Order of Tribunal affirmed-No substantial question of law. [S. 132,153D, 260A] <\/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_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-income-tax-act"],"acf":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9S2Rw-gJe","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64308","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=64308"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64309,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64308\/revisions\/64309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}