Failure to remove objections: SC dismisses large number of FBR petitions
ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court held that where office objections render the institution of proceedings legally deficient or incompetent, failure to remove those objections within the prescribed time results in the proceedings becoming time-barred once the statutory limitation period expires.
A three-judge bench, headed by Chief Justice of Pakistan Yahya Afridi, dismissed a large number of petitions moved by the Commissioner Inland Revenue of Federal Board of Revenue (FBR).
The department has called in question various judgments and orders rendered by the Lahore High Court on different dates, whereby the references instituted under the respective fiscal statutes were dismissed on the ground that the office objections raised at the time of filing had not been removed within the prescribed period and the actual statutory limitation had also passed by then, with the result that the references were treated as barred by limitation.
The judgment, authored by Justice Muhammad Shafi Siddiqui, a member of the bench, emphasised that what is incapable of constituting a valid institution within limitation cannot subsequently acquire validity merely because the defects are cured after limitation has expired. “To hold otherwise would permit a litigant, through subsequent procedural compliance, to accomplish indirectly what the law does not permit to be achieved directly, thereby defeating the mandatory operation of the law of limitation,” it added.
It said that the same conclusion emerges from a holistic reading of Rule 9 of Chapter I, Part A, Volume V of the High Court Rules and Orders. It noted that Rule 9 (i) (e) expressly authorises the Deputy Registrar (Judicial) to return the memorandum of any suit, appeal, petition or application for amendment, making up of deficiencies or for filing the requisite documents, within the period specified in the prescribed Objection Memorandum.
The judgment observed that the prescribed Objection Memorandum expressly directs that a matter returned under objections is to be re-submitted after removal and compliance of those objections within the stipulated time.
It also said that the period granted by the Deputy Registrar (Judicial) is therefore not intended to suspend, arrest or enlarge the period of statutory limitation; rather, the litigant is expressly put on notice that the obligation to remove the objections and re-submit the proceedings remains subject to the mandatory operation of the statutory limitation.
The Court observed that where a litigant neither avails the remedy provided by the Rules nor challenges the validity of the objections raised by the office, but instead accepts those objections and removes them only after the expiry of time, he cannot thereafter be permitted to contend that the objections themselves were unwarranted.
The judgment also noted that no challenge was laid before the Court to the competence of the office to raise the objections or to the validity of the objections themselves. It was not the case of any of the petitioners that the objections raised by the office were beyond the authority of the Deputy Registrar, or unrelated to the legal competence of the proceedings. The controversy before the High Court, as indeed before this Court (SC), has throughout remained confined to the legal consequences flowing from the belated removal of office objections after the expiry of the prescribed period of limitation.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2026