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BOD 713/2023Fine

A chartered accountant's firm invoiced building materials. The fine followed for a business run outside the profession.

8 min readJainam Shah

A property buyer's family accountant billed building materials through his own CA firm. The advertising charge went nowhere, but the invoices did — the Board fined him ₹30,000.

Held
FineGuilty of professional misconduct
Forum
Board of Discipline (First Schedule)
Clauses
Item (11) of Part I of the First Schedule
Decided
punished
File no.
PR/38/2021/DD/86/2021/BOD/713/2023
Source
Original order (PDF)

A property buyer's family accountant later found himself invoicing wall tiles and electrical goods through the letterhead of his own Chartered Accountant firm.1 The Institute took issue with that, and with an unrelated allegation about where his firm's name showed up online.2

What happened#

A chartered accountant's family buys an under-construction flat from a property owner. The accountant, invoking his own professional standing, assures the seller that GST on the purchase price will be exempted. He later refuses to issue any exemption letter and refuses to pay the GST himself.
The seller complains to the Institute, raising several allegations against the accountant. After investigation, only two survive screening: that his firm's name appears on paid online business directories, and that he issued invoices, through his Chartered Accountant firm, for the sale of building materials such as wall tiles and electrical items.
At the hearing, the accountant denies ever paying to be listed on the directories. On the invoices, he says the goods were bought in a personal capacity and that the paperwork was necessary to reverse an input tax credit claim — the bills were addressed, he says, to his own father, not to the seller.
A Board of the Institute is unpersuaded that the character of the transaction changes the fact of it: goods were bought and sold, invoiced through a firm licensed to practise accountancy alone. It finds the accountant guilty on that count and says nothing more about the directory listings.
Weeks later, at a separate hearing on punishment, the accountant appears by video conference and confirms he has received the findings. The Board fines him ₹30,000.

Two features of the finding stand out on a plain reading of the order.

The first is what the Board convicted him for. The complaint said the accountant had invoiced the seller himself for the materials (para 2.2). The accountant's own defence said the bills went to his father, for goods bought in a personal capacity, to satisfy a GST input-tax-credit requirement (para 5.2). The Board's findings do not say which of the two is correct — they simply hold that "the essence of the misconduct" was the act of trading building materials through a firm meant only for accountancy, "regardless of the reasoning provided" for it (para 6).3

The second is what the Board never returned to. The advertising allegation was investigated, charged, and answered at the hearing — the accountant said he had never paid any directory to list his firm (para 5.1). The Board's observations and its conclusion address only the building-materials invoices. The advertising charge is not mentioned again.

The charge#

  • Item (11) of Part I of the First Schedule — a chartered accountant in practice engaging in any business or occupation other than the profession of accountancy, unless the Institute has specifically permitted it.4

A second allegation — that the accountant's firm appeared on paid advertisement portals, in violation of Item (6) of Part I, which bars solicitation of professional work — was investigated and put to him at the hearing alongside the invoices charge (para 2, 3). It does not appear in the Board's observations or in its conclusion, which finds him guilty under Item (11) alone (para 9).

What the respondent said#

On the directory listings, he said he had filed no form and paid no fee to appear on any of them; such portals collect information from public sources on their own initiative to build their databases, he argued, and a firm's mere presence on one is not something a member does (para 5.1).

On the invoices, his account was that the underlying goods were personal purchases, not business transacted through his firm. He pointed to a letter he had submitted to the Institute in April 2021 explaining that the bills were addressed to his father, and produced the original supplier invoices to show the paperwork was for reversing an input tax credit claim rather than for trading in materials (para 5.2). He also cited a Supreme Court judgment in his support and noted that a similar complaint against his father, a Company Secretary, had already been decided in his father's favour on the same facts (para 5.3).

What the Board held#

The Board's finding on the invoices did not turn on resolving whose transaction the goods really were. It accepted that there was a personal circumstance behind the paperwork — materials bought in a personal name, and an attempt to set that right by moving them on to his father — but held that none of it changed what had actually happened: invoices for the sale of building materials had gone out under the name of a firm licensed to practise accountancy (para 6). It added that his admission of the underlying facts, and his acknowledgment that the conduct was improper, only reinforced the finding (para 7), and concluded:

in the considered opinion of the Board the Respondent is 'GUILTY' of Professional Misconduct falling within the meaning of Clause (11) of Part-I of the First Schedule to the Chartered Accountant Act, 1949 (para 9)

The order#

At the punishment hearing, held after notice was sent to him, the accountant appeared by video conference and confirmed he had received the Board's findings (para 2 of the punishment order). The Board then held:

upon consideration of the facts of the case, the consequent misconduct of [the Respondent] and keeping in view his representation before it, the Board decided to impose a fine of Rs.30,000/- (Rs. Thirty Thousand only) upon him (para 3 of the punishment order)5

A fine sits in the middle of the Board's punishment scale — heavier than a reprimand, lighter than removal of the member's name from the Register.6 The findings were signed just over six weeks before the fine, once the accountant had been given a hearing on punishment.7

Why it matters#

This section is ours, not the Board's.

"Personal" does not exempt a transaction from Item (11) if your firm's name is on the invoice. The Board accepted the accountant's account of why the goods were bought and sold, and still held him guilty — because the paperwork ran through a Chartered Accountant firm, not because the goods were dishonestly obtained. Keep any trading, however incidental or one-off, off your firm's letterhead and GST registration entirely.

A charge that is argued at a hearing can still go unanswered in the findings. The advertising allegation here was investigated and put to the accountant, and his defence to it appears in the record — but the Board's conclusion is silent on it. If a Board does not rule on a charge, there is no finding to rely on either way.

Using your firm's GST registration to fix someone else's paperwork is still your firm's registration. The stated purpose was reversing an input tax credit, not running a materials business — the Board treated the form the transaction took as decisive, not the reason behind it.

This summarises a public order and links the primary source. It is general information, not legal or professional advice.

Footnotes#

  1. The complainant was Shri Ajay Bharti of New Delhi. The respondent was CA. Akshay Mittal (M. No. 549986), of Kalkaji, New Delhi. ↩

  2. The order's heading section states the property purchase and GST dispute as the background to the complaint; the two allegations actually investigated and charged — the directory listings and the building-material invoices — are separate from that dispute and are the only matters the findings decide. ↩

  3. The complaint describes the invoices as issued "to the Complainant" (para 2.2, 3). The respondent's written statement describes the same invoices as billed to his own father (para 5.2). The findings do not reconcile the two accounts; the Board's reasoning treats the conduct as misconduct regardless of who the invoices named (para 6). ↩

  4. Item (11) of Part I of the First Schedule to the Chartered Accountants Act, 1949 bars a member in practice from engaging in any business or occupation other than the profession of chartered accountancy, except where the Institute has granted specific permission. ↩

  5. The punishment order's operative paragraph names the respondent directly, as "CA. Akshay Mittal (M. No. 549986)". This page substitutes "[the Respondent]" for that name and membership number together, to keep the same anonymisation used throughout; nothing else in the quotation is altered. ↩

  6. Section 21A(3) gives the Board of Discipline a graduated set of punishments — reprimand, removal of the member's name from the Register for a limited period, and a fine — of which this order used the fine. Check the current sub-section before relying on any figure; the amounts have been amended over time. ↩

  7. The findings, dated 30th May 2024, were signed by CA. Rajendra Kumar P (Presiding Officer), Ms. Dolly Chakraborty (IAAS, Retd.) (Government Nominee) and CA. Priti Savla (Member). The punishment order, passed on 15th July 2024 after a hearing conducted by video conferencing, was signed by a two-member Board of the same Presiding Officer and Government Nominee, without CA. Priti Savla. ↩

Written by Jainam Shah. Found guilty under Item (11) of Part I of the First Schedule; the Board ordered a fine. General information, not legal or professional advice — read the order itself before relying on it.

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