Commissioner must personally decide reference applications and cannot delegate the statutory duty to a subordinate officer.

Under the Indian Income-tax Act, 1922 reference provisions, the Commissioner was required to decide an assessee's application personally and could not delegate that duty to a subordinate officer. A failure to pass a lawful order accepting or rejecting the application was treated as a refusal to state the case and could trigger the High Court's power to require compliance with the reference procedure. The operative effect is that the Commissioner must either draw up the statement of case for reference or reject the application only if no question of law arises.

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Issues: Whether the Commissioner was bound to pass a definite order accepting or rejecting the assessee's application for reference, and whether the High Court could require him to state the case under the reference provisions.

Analysis: The application was made under the reference provisions of the Indian Income-tax Act, 1922. The Commissioner did not decide the application himself and instead sent it to a subordinate officer for disposal. The Court held that the statutory scheme required the Commissioner to act personally on the assessee's application and that he had no power to delegate that function to a subordinate. A refusal to state the case, whatever its form, was treated as sufficient to attract the High Court's power under the provision enabling an assessee to seek a direction to state the case. Since the Commissioner had failed to pass any lawful order accepting or rejecting the application, the procedure adopted was illegal.

Conclusion: The Court directed that the matter be sent back to the Commissioner for decision according to law, either by drawing up a statement of the case for reference to the High Court or by rejecting the application on the ground that no question of law arose.

Ratio Decidendi: Where the statute requires the Commissioner to decide an assessee's reference application, he must pass a lawful order himself and cannot delegate that duty to a subordinate; failure to do so can be corrected by a direction to proceed in accordance with law.

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