TaxTMI 
TaxTMI 
2022 (12) TMI 457
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.... the directions of Hon'ble Dispute Resolution Panel, Bengaluru ("DRP"), assessee filed this appeal. 2. Brief facts of the case are that assessee is engaged in the business of conducting quantitative and qualitative market research and relative services and provides related back office data processing services for domestic and international clients. They have filed their return of income for the assessment year 2012-13 on 28/11/2012 admitting total income of Rs. 32,14,98,240/- at normal provisions of the Act and MAT income of Rs. 31,37,89,151/-. 3. During the course of scrutiny proceedings, learned Assessing Officer noticed that the assessee entered into international transactions, namely, provisions of market research services and pro....
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....seeks inclusion of ACE BPO Services Pvt. Ltd., and Datamatics Financial Services Ltd. Apart from this, by way of ground Nos. 13 and 14, assessee is challenging the disallowance of management fee and trade mark license fee and also the capitalizing the expenditure on software license fee. 6. Coming to the international transactions though the assessee benchmarked the provision of market research services and provision of ITeS separately, learned TPO opined that both these services are more or less similar and fall under the category of ITeS and benchmarked the entire transaction at the entity level. Learned TPO rejected the economic analysis resulted in the study conducted by the assessee, undertook a fresh analysis by selecting ten compani....
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....lients in improving their competitive positioning by managing their business processes in addition to providing increased value, on the other hand, the assessee is engaged in providing routing back office support services in the nature of data collection and analysis to its AE, which is essentially low-end in nature, bearing minimal risks. Assessee further contended that in their own case for the assessment year 2008-09 and 2009-10, the comparability of these two entities were considered and these entities were excluded. 10. Learned TPO, however, did not find himself agreeable to this argument and opined that application of the Transactional Net Margin Method (TNMM) as the most appropriate method, which compares the net margins, much of th....
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....ess solution,s providing a broad suite of services including financial services like trade processing, reference data, accounting and finance expense management activities and sales marketing services like online operations and web analytics, business intelligence, data management and reporting etc. He further submitted that no segmental information in respect of various segments is not available. He further submitted that Infosys BPO Ltd., is a business giant with a turnover of 1312 crores whereas the assessee is of 214 crores, with huge brand value and asset base. Apart from this he submitted that on January, 4, 2012 Infosys BPO Ltd., acquired 100% of the voting interest in Portland Group Pty Ltd., a strategic sourcing and category manage....
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....fficer/learned TPO to exclude these two companies from the list of comparable companies. Accordingly Ground No. 8 is partly allowed. 16. Now coming to the request of ACE BPO Services Pvt. Ltd., and Datamatics Financial Services Ltd., which the assessee seeks to include in the list of comparables, the grievance of the assessee is that the order of the learned TPO does not decipher the reasons for their exclusion whereas learned DRP decline to retain them as comparables on the ground that the annual report was available in the segments for which the search process was conducted by the learned TPO or the same is available from the search conducted by the assessee. According to the learned DRP, the assessee failed to substantiate the functiona....
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....t all the relevant records before the learned Assessing Officer/learned TPO. Ground No. 9 is accordingly treated as allowed for statistical purposes. 19. Ground No. 13 relates to the expenditure incurred towards management service fee and trade mark license fee which issue according to the learned AR was considered by a Co-ordinate Bench of this Tribunal in assessee's own case for the assessment year 2011-12 in ITA No. 627 & 636/Hyd/2016 and by order dated 04/10/2021 it was restored to the file of learned Assessing Officer for fresh factual verification as per law by affording opportunity to the assessee and directing the assessee to file all the documentary evidences in support of their claim. 20. Considering the similarity of the issue ....