The Supreme Court directed integration of technology adopted to streamline, monitor all stages in government revenue litigation, to ITAT, CESTAT, and other Tribunals.
Mr Balbir Singh, Additional Solicitor General, has tendered a statement titled “Reducing Delays in Litigation Management” in pursuance of the order of this Court dated 27 August 2021.
A Committee was constituted in order to facilitate the objective of ensuring that litigation involving the Union of India and the Tribunals constituted under revenue legislation, is duly monitored so as to provide seamless integration at all stages by adopting Information and Communication Technology (ICT).
The Committee studied and examined threadbare all the recommendations of the Hon’ble Supreme Court and also invited suggestions from both the Boards i.e. CBIC and CBDT in this regard. After having detailed deliberations with all the stakeholders including NIC, necessary changes have been brought in the litigation management system of CBDT and CBIC using IT.
The committee guided that LIMBS Portal has been re-designed in such a way that CBIC, CBDT would require to feed only minimum relevant data of the cases of High Courts and Tribunals on the LIMBS portal which would form the basic case data for SLP/Appeal initiation. his will result in minimum human intervention and cut down delay in having information and then updating on LIMBS portal. The records of High Court data in LIMBS will finally be updated manually (in case of wrong CNR number) or automatically including the disposal information, since the disposal and date of disposal information is vital for seeking advice internally and from DOLA/CAS.
Further, Ensure integration of LIMBS with the IT system of Courts, Tribunals including e- Courts system of NIC which will cut down delay in having Judgments for subsequent actions.
The division bench of Justice DY Chandrachud and Justice AS Bopanna said, “Since the work of the Committee is an ongoing process, we consider it appropriate to list the further proceedings to monitor compliance on 7 March 2022.”
“In the meantime, the integration shall be extended, besides the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal (ITAT), also to the Customs Excise and Service Tax Appellate Tribunal (CESTAT) and other Tribunals. The Committee will co-ordinate with the President of the CESTAT in the meantime to ensure that this is achieved,” the court added.
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