An estimated 69 orders passed by as many as 23 members of various
benches of the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal (ITAT) are now the subject
matter of an unprecedented nationwide inquiry for alleged corruption by
the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
The ITAT, a
quasi-judicial body, is the highest income tax appellate authority. Its
bench usually has two members — a judicial and an accountant member —
who are selected by a board chaired by a sitting judge of the Supreme
Court.
All orders under the scanner are alleged to have been
issued in "collusion" with chartered accountancy firm S K Tulsiyan and
Co. It was in 2008 that the CBI had first registered a case against
Jugal Kishore, an ITAT member from Kolkata, for allegedly receiving a
bribe from the bosses of S K Tulsiyan and Co., for delivering
"pre-decided'' judgments. The CBI recovered Rs 28 lakh from Kishore's
residence.
After a three-year-long investigation, the CBI
identified at least 69 judgments where it said S K Tulsiyan & Co.
not only had prior knowledge of these orders but in many cases is
suspected to have written them as well.
The most glaring case is
that of the tribunal's Kolkata bench — as many as 12 of its orders were
recovered from Tulsiyan's hard discs before these were delivered, the
CBI has alleged.
The Law Ministry has granted sanction to
register Preliminary Enquiries (PEs) against 15 ITAT members and four
officials of the Income Tax Department.
Ten ITAT members are
working in the Kolkata bench; others are from the benches in Mumbai,
Chennai, Bhubaneswar, Patna and Hyderabad. The officers under probe are
either judicial members or accountant members.
The sanctions were
received by the CBI after a long delay and reportedly after the Law
Ministry sought the opinion of Attorney General Goolam Vahanvati. The
CBI had already registered three PEs against eight other ITAT members,
of the Kolkata and Guwahati benches. These eight ITAT members had
retired and, therefore, no sanction for registering PEs was required in
their case.