The Income Tax Appellate Tribunal (ITAT), Mumbai bench has held that no incriminating material was unearthed during search and confirms deletion of addition made u/s 153A.
The assessee, Padmshree Dr. D.Y. Patil University is a trust that has been registered u/s 12A of the Act. The primary object of the trust is to impart education; and the trust inter-alia runs a Medical College, Dental College, Physiotherapy, Biotechnology, and Nursing College.
Consequent to the search in the case of M/s. D.Y. Patil Group, the AO made re-assessments of assessee u/s 153A read with section 143(3) of the Act making certain additions alleging that section 11(1)(d) of the Act only allows benefits of corpus donation if it is voluntarily given by the donors, and since the development fees are compulsorily charged/extracted from the students, the assessee cannot be given the benefit of section 11(1)(d) of the Act and disallowed the claim.
Aggrieved by the action of the AO, the assessee preferred an appeal before the CIT(A) who was pleased to delete the addition/disallowance after going through the remand report from the AO on the ground that there was no incriminating material unearthed during the search. Aggrieved revenue preferred appeal before the ITAT.
The Tribunal observed that in the absence of any complaint or inquiry merely because a copy of fee receipt was found during search which [fee receipt] include the item of development fees, cannot be a ground to form an opinion that the same was compulsorily extracted from the students. The same cannot be termed as incriminating material against the assessee. The Coram of Mr. Aby T. Varkey, JM, and Mr. Gagan Goyal, AM by relying on the decision of the Bombay High Court decision in case of CIT Vs. Continental Warehousing Ltd. has dismissed the revenue appeal.
Mr. H. N. Singh and Mr. Satyaprakash Singh appeared on behalf of the revenue and assessee respectively.
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