M/S. PMC RUBBER CHEMICALS INDIA PRIVATE LIMITED ,HOOGHLY vs. ACIT, CIRCLE - 24, HOOGHLY , HOOGHLY

The captioned appeal filed by the Assessee , pertaining to assessment year 2012-13 is directed against the order passed by the Commissioner of Income Tax (Appeal)-6, Kolkata, which in turn arises out of an assessment order passed by the Assessing Officer u/s 143(3) of the Income Tax Act, 1961 (in short the Act) dated 31.03.2015.

At the outset itself, the ld. Counsel for the assessee submitted that the appeal filed before the ld. CIT(A) was late, for more than one and half years due to lack of proper legal advice. The ld. CIT(A) should have admitted the appeal after condonation of delay and adjudicate the appeal on merits. Therefore, ld. Counsel prayed the Bench that this issue should be remitted back to the file of the ld.

We have heard both the parties and perused the material available on record. We note that Ld. CIT(A), he has not condoned the delay in filing the appeal. We note that there was delay in filing the appeal before ld. CIT(A) for a period of one and half year. The ld. CIT(A) did not condone the delay in filing appeal. The assessee explained the reasons for late filing appeal stating that there was lack of proper legal advice. That is , due to improper legal advise, the assessee could not file the appeal on time. However, the ld. CIT(A) rejected the explanation of the assessee and noted that assessee has failed to justify the delay by demonstrating sufficient cause of delay. This way, the ld. CIT(A) dismissed the appeal of the assessee. We note that improper legal advice is a sufficient ground to condone the delay. The ld. CIT(A) ought to condone the delay as the assessee justified the delay stating that it was due to improper legal advice. We note that substantial justice should not be denied because of technical reasons therefore we direct the Ld. CIT(A) to consider the condonation petition of the assessee and after going through the reasons of condonation the Ld. CIT(A) should condone the delay in filing appeal as per the law and admit the appeal of the assessee to adjudicate the issue on merits. Therefore we set aside the order of the Ld. CIT(A) and remit the issue back to the file of the Ld. CIT(A) to adjudicate the issue on merits.

In the result, the appeal of the assessee is treated to be allowed for statistical purposes.