1. These eight tax cases constituting one batch have come to this court on reference made by the Income-tax Appellate Tribunal, Patna Bench, Patna, under Sec. 256(1) of the Income-tax Act, 1961. These references cases arise from assessment proceedings concerning the same assessee but relating to different assessment years from 1979-80 (T. C. No. 9 of 1990) to assessment year 1987-88 (T. C. No. 40 of 1994). There appears to be some confusion in mentioning the assessment years in these cases, for example, T. C. No. 9 of 1994 is shown to arise from the assessment years 1982-83, 1983-84 and 1984-85 while T. C. No. 1 of 1991 and T. C. No. 3 of 1994 are also shown to arise from the assessment years 1982-83 and 1984-85, respectively ; similarly, the assessment year 1986-87 is mentioned in three cases being T. C. Nos. 11 of 1994, 39 of 1994 and 40 of 1994. We have not tried to find out whether this confusion is the result of typing mistake or some other mistakes. We propose to confine ourselves to the question of law referred for our opinion and we have merely indicated the anomaly so that it may be sorted out in the Tribunal.

2. In all these cases, the Tribunal has referred the sa