1981 (8) TMI 31
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....nt year not involved in the appeal before him, was justified in law in refusing to delete such direction given by the Appellate Assistant Commissioner? " It appears that the assessee is an individual. The assessee had taken on lease a plot of land at Worli, Bombay; the said plot of land was acquired by the Government on 12th May, 1961, and the assessee received a sum of Rs. 2,55,645 as compensation. The ITO brought this amount to tax in the assessment year 1971-72 as the income received under the head "Other sources " in the previous year relevant to this assessment year. The assessee had appealed to the AAC and had contended that this amount was not taxable as it was a windfall and, alternatively, it was not taxable in the assessment ye....
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.... assessee had filed a cross-objection against the direction given to the ITO, to bring the amount to tax in the correct assessment year. It was submitted that the AAC had no jurisdiction to decide that point and he should have confined himself to the finding that this amount was not taxable in this assessment year. It was submitted that the amount was actually compensation for immovable property and that being a capital asset, there was no question of treating this amount as business income. It was also submitted that according to the provisions of the Act, capital gains should be taxed only in the assessment year relevant to the previous year in which the transfer took place and, therefore, the assessment was rightly cancelled by the AAC. ....
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....th which we are now concerned. The Revenue relied on the decision of the Andhra Pradesh High Court in the, case of Khan Bahadur Ahmed Alladin & Sons v. CIT [1969] 74 ITR 651, to argue that the right to receive compensation was an inchoate right which could materialise only when the award is made. That case however, was concerned with additional compensation accruing, by reason of enhancement, to the assessee and there is no reference to the provision of s. 45 which, as we have seen, requires the capital gains to be assessed only in the assessment year relevant to the previous year in which the transfer took place. We are, therefore, of the opinion that the decision of the AAC to exclude this amount from the assessment of this assessment yea....
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....t of tax payable on the basis of such fresh assessment. " Here, we are not concerned with cls. (b) and (c) to sub-s. (1) of s. 251. The Tribunal, as we have mentioned before, came to a categorical finding that the AAC had no jurisdiction to direct the ITO to bring the amount to tax in the correct assessment year, for, be could only decide the matter relating to the assessment year before him and not otherwise. This view of the Tribunal is corroborated by several decisions of the Supreme Court We may refer to the latest decision of the Supreme Court in the case of Rajinder Nath v. CIT [1979] 120 ITR 14, where the Supreme Court categorically observed that the expressions " finding " and " direction ", in s. 153(3) were limited in meaning. ....
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....Supreme Court in the aforesaid decision, in our opinion, the Tribunal having already held that the AAC had no jurisdiction to direct the ITO to bring the amount to tax in the correct assessment year, the Tribunal was in error in declining to delete the direction, because the ITO, according to the Tribunal, had the same power under s. 153(3) of the Act. Whether the AAC has the power under that section is another matter but if the authority holds that the AAC had no jurisdiction to come to a finding that the income could be taxed in a particular year, then whether that amount could be brought to tax by resort to some other provisions, irrespective of the finding of the AAC is, in our opinion, irrelevant. In that view of the matter, we are ....
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