For a panel handling the task of resolving income and wealth tax cases, the Income Tax Settlement Commission has a very pressing in-house problem: three out of its five chairpersons don’t last more than 200 days.

Over the past 10 years, the commission has seen 23 chairpersons, some with tenures of as little as 15, 29 and 44 days.

The present chairperson, Urvashi Saxena, retires on June 13, after a tenure of three months. All told, there have been 34 chairpersons over 31 years of the Commission’s existence.

The Government is finally trying to fix this problem. A May 31, 2007 communiqué, notifying the new rules, says: “As per the amended rules, the chairman shall be selected from amongst the serving members of the Commission having minimum remaining service of six months on the date of notifying the vacancy for the post of Chairman.”

The revolving-door problem has only aggravated in the past decade. From an average tenure of more than two years (788 days) between April 1976 and December 1991, the duration fell to less than a year (313 days) during the June 1992 to December 1999 period. And from June 2000 till June 2007 (when Saxena retires), the figure has crashed to a third (108 days).

President of the ITSC Bar Association K P Garg says that the answer isn’t ensuring a minimum six-month tenure. Pointing out that unlike in other similar authorities like the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal, Authority for Advance Ruling, MRTP Commission, and Central Administrative Tribunal, the retirement age of members of the ITSC continues to be 62 years, Garg says this should also be raised to 65.

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