BharatTax Research·Published 19 September 2026
A citation study of 292,668 tribunal judgments found that the authorities the ITAT relies on most are not about tax. They are about admission — and two of the three are older than most of the assessments they are cited in.
Every practitioner keeps a mental list of the cases that win arguments on the merits. Far fewer keep a list of the cases that decide whether the merits are reached — and on the numbers, those matter more often.
When every judgment on our ITAT database was scanned for the authorities it cites, three procedural decisions appeared in the top seven, carrying 11,986 citations between them. None of them turns on the computation of income.
1. Raising a ground you did not raise below
National Thermal Power Co. Ltd. v. CIT (1998) 229 ITR 383 (SC) — 5,796 citations
The Supreme Court held that the Tribunal is not confined to the grounds set out in the memorandum of appeal, and may consider a question of law that arises from facts already on the record, even where it was not urged before the authorities below. The reasoning is that the object of assessment proceedings is to determine the correct tax liability.
At the desk. A legal point missed before the CIT(A) is not necessarily lost, provided the facts supporting it are already on record. What it does not permit is new evidence, or a ground requiring fresh investigation of facts.
2. Delay in filing
Collector, Land Acquisition v. Mst. Katiji (1987) 167 ITR 471 (SC) — 3,926 citations
The most-cited authority on condonation of delay in tax appeals is not a tax case. It is a two-page judgment on an appeal about compensation for acquired land, in which the Supreme Court held that “sufficient cause” should receive a liberal construction so as to advance substantial justice, and observed that refusing condonation can result in a meritorious matter being thrown out at the very threshold.
At the desk. The liberal approach is not automatic condonation — the delay still has to be explained. But Katiji is the authority that frames the enquiry as one of substantial justice rather than technical default, and it is cited in nearly four thousand of our judgments for precisely that. The qualifications the Supreme Court has since added are set out in our separate commentary, Katiji and the condonation formula.
3. Not appearing
CIT v. Multiplan India Ltd. (1991) 38 ITD 320 (ITAT, Delhi) — 2,264 citations
A Tribunal decision, not a High Court one — it is reported in ITD, which carries only tribunal decisions. It is cited for treating an appeal as unadmitted or dismissing it where the appellant does not appear to prosecute it.
At the desk. Read it alongside Rule 24 of the ITAT Rules and the line of authority on whether the Tribunal may dispose of an appeal for non-appearance rather than on the merits. Multiplan is cited heavily, but it is not the end of the argument.
Where the numbers come from
The corpus. 292,668 ITAT, High Court and Supreme Court judgments were scanned for citation strings in the standard form, yielding 732,794 citations across 26,763 distinct decisions. Parallel citations are merged, so a case reported in two series counts once.
What the counts do not say. “Cited” means a judgment mentions the authority. It does not distinguish a case followed from one distinguished or doubted, so a frequently-contested decision scores as highly as a settled one.
The wider pattern is worth knowing: of those 292,668 judgments, fewer than half — 44.6% — cite a reported authority at all, and a thousand decisions account for almost half of every citation made. The law that decides appeals is a good deal narrower than the law that gets written about.
Further reading
Full analysis, with the complete ranking, the age profile of the cases still being relied on, and the sections generating the most litigation: The Most-Cited Cases in Indian Income Tax Litigation on BharatTax.net, where each decision has its own page listing the judgments that follow it.