The National Judicial Reference System (NJRS) project is one of the key measures being taken up by the Central Board of Direct Taxes to streamline the litigation management system in the Income Tax Department (ITD). NJRS is envisaged to be a comprehensive electronic database of all appeals and judgments in Direct Tax cases pending before various judicial authorities i.e. Income Tax Appellate Tribunal (ITAT), High Courts and the Supreme Court of India. It will also bring automation in the working of the Judicial wings of the department. NJRS has the facility to help in tracking of appeals in ITAT, High Courts and the Supreme Court, and issuing alerts and reminders in case of delays in filing appeals.

NJRS is also a knowledge repository that will enable the Assessing Officers to be consistent in framing assessment orders due to easy accessibility of judicial information, case laws and judgments. Thus, NJRS will help in improving the quality of work output. It will assist the Departmental Representatives/Counsels in improving the quality of representation before Tribunals & Courts and enhancing the success rate of the department in appeals.

NJRS is thus envisaged as a tool for effective tracking and monitoring of Appeals at various stages, reduce litigation & disputed tax demand by bunching & targeting high demand cases, a comprehensive reference system and a decision support system to achieve efficiency in the tax litigation processes of the Income Tax Department, Government of India. It is accessible to all officers of ITD over the internet.

A consortium comprising of M/s NSDL e-Governance Infrastructure Ltd. and M/s Skorydov Systems Pvt. Ltd. is the Implementation Agency (IA) for the NJRS project.

The following courts are covered under NJRS:

• Income Tax Appellate Tribunal (ITAT) (All 27 cities)
• All High Courts
• Supreme Court of India
• Authority for Advance Ruling (AAR)

All appeals/ judgments under the following Acts are covered under NJRS:

• Income Tax Act, 1961,
• Wealth Tax Act, 1957,
• Expenditure Tax Act, 1987,
• Interest Tax Act, 1974 and
• Gift Tax Act, 1958

There are conceptually two components of NJRS for appeals and judgments that are accessible through a unified interface of the NJRS portal:

• Appeal Repository Management System (ARMS) - an electronic database of all pending appeals at Income Tax Appellate Tribunal (ITAT), High Courts (HCs) and the Supreme Court of India (SC)
• Judicial Research & Reference System (JRRS) - an electronic database of all orders/judgments of ITAT, Authority of Advance Ruling, HCs and SC

NJRS has been designed for exclusive use by the ITD users. Taxpayers (litigants) have been provided limited access of their own appeals in NJRS.

• Homepage for displaying a consolidated position of litigation in the department and important judgments flagged by users
• Dashboard for display of jurisdiction specific information about cases in various courts. Alerts for users about new messages received from other users. Calendar for display of cases fixed in the various courts on any particular date
• Provision to search appeals and judgments database with enhanced search facility based on key metadata elements. Facility for filtering of search results based on keywords/catchphrases, AY, Section/Sub-section, etc. Functionality to save searches
• Facility to view scanned appeal documents and the related appeal data (metadata) such as key phrases, sections involved etc
• Workflows for officers of the department engaged in litigation related activities
• Facility to research and prepare case notes. The NJRS will support the research by displaying related appeals and judgments
• Facility to enter and maintain a case diary for day to day case proceedings. Functionality to identify related cases for bunching of appeals by officers engaged in litigation work at the ITAT, High Courts and the Supreme Court
• Facility to mark appeals for priority attention
• Facility to send messages between various users (primarily between officers engaged in litigation work and those engaged in assessment work)
• Facility for data analysis and generation of reports based on data contained within the ARMS and JRRS
• Facility for users to upload articles on litigation issues and a library of Acts, Circulars, notifications and other publications for reference

Please note that some of the functionalities are not available in the beta release. Pls see Q1.9 for details.

The project aims to obtain data directly from courts’ computer systems, subject to requisite approval from the courts. So far the following courts have agreed to provide data from their computer systems for the NJRS project – ITAT (all 27 cities), Supreme Court of India, High Courts of Punjab & Haryana, Gujarat, AP & Telangana, Karnataka, Guwahati, Sikkim, Madhya Pradesh and Kolkata.

In addition to the data received from the courts, a Central Data Processing Centre (CDPC) has been established at Nashik to pick up more metadata from the appeal documents scanned at the various Regional Scanning Centres (RSCs). These RSCs have been setup at the 27 ITAT locations in the country and also at the Directorate General of Legal & Research, ITD.

Some data is also to be sourced from other computer systems of the department. For example, the jurisdiction over a particular appeal is determined based on the PAN number available in the appeal documents and by determining the concerned AO from the PAN database of the department. The post and employee data is provided by the HRMS system of the department. The Acts and Circulars are to be provided by the DIT(System)-III from the www.incometaxindia.gov.in website database.

M/s Skorydov Systems Pvt. Ltd. is responsible for providing the judgment related data.

NJRS has been designed for exclusive use by the ITD users. Taxpayers have been provided limited access to NJRS to view their own cases.

Functionality has been made available at https://www.njrs-itd.gov.in