Providing only 3 days Time to Assessee for Filing documents & Later Refusing to Take them On Record is Violation of Natural Justice: Delhi HC [Read Order]

Finance Act - Delhi High Court - taxscan

The Delhi High Court recently invalidated the action of the Income Tax Department in providing only 3 days time to file a long list of documents and later on refusing to take them on record by holding that the same would be against principles of natural justice.

Justices S Muralidhar and Prathibha M Singh was hearing 2 writ petitions wherein the assesses were aggrieved by the above action of the DRP.

Assessee, in the instant case was a foreign company and documents were lying in Paris. The DRP on 20th July 2017 suo motu required the Assessees to submit a fairly long list of documents/information on or before 24th July 2017. Since there was a weekend falling between the two dates and the Petitioner had to get many of the documents sought from Paris, the Petitioner asked for some more time to submit the documents. This was declined by the DRP stating that it had to pass orders by 31st July, 2017.

However, the Officer passed the impugned orders on 24th July itself without taking note of the documents despatched to it by courier.

Allowing the writ petitions, the bench noted that there is a clear violation of the principles of natural justice. “despite the time being granted to the Petitioner till 24th July 2017 to submit documents sought by the DRP, the DRP passed the order on 24th July, 2017 itself and that too without taking on record the documents produced by the Petitioner till then. The time given for the Petitioner to do so was just four days. This was clearly unreasonable, particularly, since there was an intervening weekend between 20th and 24th July, 2017,” the bench said.

Read the full text of the Judgment below.

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