I-T dept starts drive to dispose of appeals, 0.54 million at last count

financialexpress.com:

As many as 5,44,205 appeals were pending resolution with the Income Tax (IT) Department at commissioner (appeals) level as of January 31 this year, and 63,246 at various Income Tax Appellate Tribunals (ITATs), High Courts, and the Supreme Court, FE has learnt.

To be precise, the cases pending in ITATs were 20,266 High Courts, 37,436; and Supreme Court 5,544.

The large pendency is even as the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) has laid emphasis on disposing of income tax appeals in its 100-day action plan for FY25.

“Each Commissioner of Income Tax (Appeals) should focus on disposing of at least 150 appeals by June 30,” a senior official said. “This seems attainable, as an internal target would expedite the resolution process.”

The government has taken several initiatives in the past few budgets with an aim to speed up the appeal disposal time including the introduction of a parallel authority (Joint Commissioner of Appeal) at the level of CIT(A), however, backlog of cases has not reduced considerably, say experts while adding the latest number of pending appeals is an “eye opener”.

Amit Maheshwari, Tax Partner, AKM Global, says: “Once an appeal is filed before CIT(A) or ITAT, it still takes more than a year to receive the notice of first hearing and in some cases, even more which causes a backlog.”

“Hence, there is an urgent need to introduce a maximum time limit for deciding the appeals by ITAT and CIT(A),” he says.

Another reason for the pendency of appeals is the precedent based assessments conducted by the assessing officers. Assessing officers usually do not look at the tax issues with a fresh approach during scrutiny and try to conclude the case based on the decision in previous years, which leads to unnecessary