Belated Form 10B filing cannot alone defeat trust expenditure claims; matter remitted for fresh consideration on merits.

Belated filing of Form 10B was treated as a procedural lapse and not a ground, by itself, to deny otherwise valid expenditure to a section 12AA-registered educational trust. The Tribunal noted that the audit report had been filed belatedly and that audited details were produced in rectification proceedings, so the claim required reconsideration on merits rather than rejection on technical grounds. It therefore remitted the matter to the Assessing Officer for fresh adjudication after considering the belated Form 10B and observing principles of natural justice.

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Issues: Whether disallowance of the assessee's claimed expenditure could be sustained merely because Form 10B was filed belatedly and was not furnished with the return, despite the assessee being registered under section 12AA and the audited details being produced in rectification proceedings.

Analysis: The appeal concerned an educational trust whose return had been processed under section 143(1), after which the claimed expenditure was ignored and rectification relief was refused because the audit report in Form 10B was not filed within time. The Court held that the omission to file the report along with the return was a procedural lapse and that valid expenditure could not be denied merely on technical grounds. It also noted that the belated audit report had been filed and that the matter required fresh consideration with due regard to the principles of natural justice.

Conclusion: The disallowance was not upheld as final. The matter was remitted to the Assessing Officer for fresh adjudication after considering the belatedly filed Form 10B, and the appeal was allowed for statistical purposes.

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