May 28, 2002	Tuesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 15,1423

ISLAMABAD, May 27: The government is likely to place appellate authorities under the control of Member Legal, CBR, for effective monitoring and evaluation of their performance.

Official sources told Dawn on Monday that the committee constituted by Central Board of Revenue (CBR) for dispute resolution recommended to the government to take out the appellate authorities from the control of line members.

The proposal was made in view of the fact that billions of rupees were stuck in appeals. The decision was likely to be implemented from the next financial year, the officials said.

The committee observed that it was desirable to improve tax compliance, to reduce the compliance cost as well as volume of litigation between the tax authorities and the tax collectors.

It was recommended that both the appellate authorities may be approached to ensure that notice of appeal was issued at least 10 days before the date of hearing.

All cases pertaining to one particular assessing officer may preferably be heard on the specified date and time in order to ensure that minimum number of departmental officers were deputed to attend hearing to avoid disturbance in the normal work.

The committee proposed that in view of pendancy of a fairly large number of appeals in superior courts involving sizable revenue, law division may be requested to constitute special fiscal benches in the High Courts to exclusively hear tax cases.

It was recommended that the RCIT be empowered to grant stay of demand up to 85 per cent in genuine hardship cases.

A research cell should be set up comprising persons having sufficient experience on the appellate side, which would suggest ways and means as well as solutions to the hitches in the appellate system.

The work of first appeal was being performed by the AAC (Appeals) as well as CIT (Appeals). Sometimes the AAC, an officer of junior grade, was reluctant to take decisions in cases involving substantive question of law. To overcome this, the committee recommended that the post of AAC may be upgraded to CIT (appeals).

It was also proposed that the functions of settlement may be assigned to the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal with one judicial member and one accountant member, while performing function of settlement commission, these members would not indulge in any judicial work.