1924 (3) TMI 1

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....der notification of the Chairman every company transacting business within the municipality for profit shall pay a half-yearly tax known as " Tax on Companies " on the scale shown in Schedule IV, provided it has transacted business for more than 60 days in the half-year. Section 16 of Schedule IV lays down the method of assessment, from which it is clear that the assessment is made on the paid-up capital of the company, although in certain cases if the head office or branch or principal office of the company is not in the municipality, and it is able to show certain figures of gross income, the tax on the paid-up capital is to some extent reduced. The penalty for non-payment of this tax is set out in section 30 and subsequent sect....

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....Australasia and China Telegraph Company, Ltd. 1 ITC 120/44 Mad. 489 is therefore of no assistance. Another case quoted by him appears to us equally not in point. It is Ward & Co., Ltd. v. Commissioner of Taxes [1923] A.C. 145. There it was held that money spent by a brewery company in printing and distributing anti-prohibition literature was not "expenditure exclusively incurred in the production of the assessable income", and therefore the company was not entitled to make the deduction, the ground of the decision being that such expenditure was not incurred in the production of the assess able income but was expended with a view to influencing public opinion against taking a step which would have partly destroyed the earning of p....

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....ction was affirmed. One of the learned Judges, the Earl of Halsbury, in that case lays down as a deciding factor in the case that a person engaging in such a business "must, if he carries on that business pay this tax; it is the Act of the legislature which makes him pay it, and it is not a thing that is open to his own will or option. "Another learned Judge, Lord Atkinson, called it a compulsory levy and described it as an impost which "must necessarily be paid in order to set up the system which is found to be vital to their trade prospects to set up." In the second case, Usher's Wiltshire Brewery Company, Ltd. 's case (supra) all the five learned judges composing the House followed the former case. That case is ev....