VENKATARAMA AYYAR, J.

This is a reference under Section 21 of the Chartered Accountants Act (Act XXXVIII of 1949). The respondent is a partner in a firm of chartered accountants. Messrs. A. Mohamed and Co., are a firm of merchants carrying on business in hardware in the city of Madras and they entrusted the work of auditing their accounts and preparing income-tax returns to the respondent's firm. The complaint against the respondent is that he performed this work negligently

It appears from the assessment order dated 31st October, 1944, that Messrs. A. Mohamed & Company had considerable business in black market and maintained two sets of accounts-regular day books and ledgers for the pen market transactions and a separate book for the black market transactions. While the former accounts contained entries, showing daily transactions the latter contained only consolidated entries made at the end of each week, of all the transactions of that week. At the end of the financial year all the weekly entries in the separate accountant were totalled up and these totals were entered in the regular accounts. For the year in question, 1943-44, the entries thus carried into regular acc