2019 (2) TMI 1202

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....assed for the sake of convenience. 2. Brief facts of the case are, the assessee company filed its statements in Forms 24Q and 26Q for all quarters for FYs 2012-13 to 2015-16 relevant to AYs 2013-14 to 2016-17. CPC raised late filing levy u/s 234E for each quarter. The intimation of such levy was communicated to the registered email. The assessee claims that it has not received any of such communication. Only on receipt of consolidated demand notice on 15/06/2017, assessee came to know about the demand. Immediately, it has written to AO and subsequently, downloaded the information from traces on 20/10/2017. All these communications are part of paper book. Considering the date of communication as 20/10/2017, it filed appeals before the ....

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....ed quarter wise from FYs 2013-14 to 2015-16 by the assessee on 20th October, 2017, and accordingly, filed the appeals before the CIT(A). 6.1 When the Bench asked the ld. DR whether intimation of regular statement processing sent on registered mail, the ld. DR filed a statement which clearly indicates that certain quarters intimations were not sent or sent belatedly. 6.2 At this juncture, we are of the view that there is no point in sending the appeals to CIT(A) to decide the same on merits, as the issue in dispute is legal and settled issue, therefore, we adjudicate all these appeals, on merits. 7. Considered the rival submissions and perused the material on record. We find that similar issue came up for consideration before the co....

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.... at the same time, we note that the Hon'ble Karnataka High Court held that levy of fees u/s 234E while processing returns, TDS u/s 200A prior to 01.06.2015 was without any authority of law. With two divergent view of the Hon'ble High Courts on the issue and in the absence of any decision by the jurisdictional High Court, we concur with the learned Counsel for the assessee that as per the well accepted rule of construction, if two reasonable constructions of a statute are possible the construction which favours the assessee must be adopted. In view of the same, respectfully following the decision of the Karnataka High Court in the case of Fatheraj Singhvi (Supra), we hold that the fees levied in all the present cases u/s 234E prior t....