1945 (7) TMI 9

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....ax Officer was by virtue of the provisions of Section 56 of the Act precluded from re-opening the assessment only for the purposes of super-tax, the assessment made by the first Income-tax Officer having become final for the purposes of income-tax?" The second question was not argued, and it was agreed that the question there posed would stand or fall by the decision on the first question. The point is a simple one The income of the assessee firm for the charge year 1939-40 was computed at ₹ 54,024 for the purposes of income-tax and super-tax. The officer who made the orginal assessment came to the conclusion that the rate at which super-tax should be charged by virtue of the provisions of Section 6(4)(v) of the Finance Act of ....

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....f the Income-tax Act as it stood before the amendment of the year 1939, and it is not disputed before us that it is the amended section, as it now stands, that applies. The pertinent part of that section, before the amendment of 1939, read as follows:- "If for any reason income, profits or gains chargeable to income-tax has escaped assessment in any year or has been assessed at too low a rate, the Income-tax Officer may, at any time within one year of the end of that year, serve on the person liable to pay tax on such income, profits or gains, or, in the case of a company, on the principal officer thereof, a notice containing all or any of the requirements which may be included in a notice under sub-section (2) of Section 22 and may p....

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....f definite information which has come into his possession. Now, while a mistake of law might have been permissible as a ground for reopening an assessment before the amendment of 1939, we are satisfied that that cannot be the case now. It is urged on behalf of the Commissioner of Income-tax that definite information can be obtained from a book, and that the information on which action was taken was derived from a more careful reading of the Act than that made by the first assessing officer. This is not definite information at all. It amounts to nothing more than a change of opinion on the part of the authority making the assessment. The second opinion might be right or it might be wrong, and the fact that the second opinion has, in the even....

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....s [1945] 13 ITR 194, and that decision is affirmed by a later case in the same Court in Commissioner of Income-tax, Madras v. Lakshmana Iyer [1945] 13 ITR 242 . Reliance has been placed on behalf of the Commissioner on a Privy Council decision in Commissioner of Income-tax, Bengal v. Mahaliram Ramjidas [1940] 8 ITR 442, for the proposition that the provisions of the Income-tax Act should be so interpreted as to make the machinery workable. No difficulty of this nature arises in the case before us since the only point at issue is the interpretation of the words "definite information." Finally it is contended that the cases we have cited are not good law and that the English decisions based on Williams case (supra) should be follow....