K I SEKHARAN Vs. CIT

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The petitioner is a businessman carrying on trade in rice and other businesses. For the assessment year 1956-57 he filed a return showing his income as Rs. 36,875/-. The accounts he produced for the year1955-56 showed only a turn-over of Rs. 1,73,302/- while the corresponding turn-over for 9 months in the previous year was Rs. 3,32,315/-. The Department did not accept the correctness of the figures shown in his accounts. The Income Tax Officer made enquiries at Banks, Railway Stations, Post Offices etc. and found out that the averment that the petitioner was not doing business for the period 1-4-1955 to 31-12-1955, was false and that he was doing business throughout the year in the name and style of some of his trusted dependants. His enquiries at the State Bank of India revealed that the assessee had, during the period April, July and August 1955, cleared many Railway Receipts for large quantities of rice drawn in the name of one N. Bhaskaran who was an employee of the assessee, that the said Bhaskaran is a man of straw and an employee under the petitioner on pay of Rs. 35/- per mensem, who on being questioned disowned having had business with any dealer in rice, that the assessee had been keeping large sums of money amounting to fifteen and thirty thousands of rupees in cash at hand during the period March to December 1955 and that he was also retaining an agent from this place in Andhra to whom remittances had been made regularly during the months of April to December 1955. The assessees attention was brought to these and other facts discovered by the Officer and the explanations he offered were found to be thoroughly unsatisfactory by the Income Tax Officer. The Income Tax Officer therefore found that the assessee has not disclosed his real income in his accounts. He fixed the turnover of the assessee, on the basis of the figures given by him in the previous year, at Rs. 4,00,000/- and estimated the concealed income as Rs. 25.000/- The Appellate Assistant Commissioner of Income Tax, Kozhikode, on being appealed to by the assessee, confirmed, the findings of the Income Tax Officer but reduced the estimate of concealed income to Rs. 12,500/-. On further appeal by the assessee; the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal, Madras B Branch, affirmed the orders of the above said officers in all material aspects but made a further reduction in the estimate of concealed income by Rs. 2,500/- The assessee then made an application under R.66(1) before the Appellate Tribunal to state the case and refer it to this Court,

(2.) The decision of the Appellate Tribunal as is clear from what is stated above is on a pure question of fact and the same cannot be assailed except on the ground that there is no evidence at all to support the same;

(3.) A finding on a question of fact can be attacked as erroneous in law only if it is not supported by any evidence or if it is perverse. But when there is some evidence to consider, the decision of the Tribunal is final even though a court might not on those materials have come to the same conclusion if it had the power to substitute its own judgment in the matter. The standards set for courts by the Evidence Act are not applicable to enquiries by Taxing Officers. It is open to them to arrive at a conclusion on an appreciation of a number of facts established by the evidence come to their notice, and that not by considering the evidentiary weight of each single fact in isolation by assessing the cumulative effect of all the facts in their setting in the picture as a whole. See the observations of the Supreme Court in Sree Meenakshi Mills Ltd. v. I.T. Commissioner (AIR 1957 S.C. 49) where Their Lordships approved of the statement of Lord Radcliffe in Edwards (Inspector to Taxes) v. Bairstow (28 ITR 579):