Here is the twist in the day's non-prosecution saga. In the first two dismissals, private applicants lost their references by abandoning them. In this one — Commissioner of Income Tax v. M/s Bestow Interior (279 of 2008) — the applicant was the tax department itself, and the same division bench (Justice Agha Faisal, author; Justice Shah Nawaz Memon) dismissed the department's own reference for non-prosecution.
The facts follow the familiar pattern: the reference had remained dormant for years, no effort was made to prosecute it, the applicant went unrepresented at the hearing, and the bench applied the Supreme Court's ruling in Commissioner Inland Revenue v. Rafeh Limited (PLD 2020 SC 518). The outcome, though, carries a sharper message precisely because the applicant was the state.
The legal point is clean and worth remembering: non-pursuit extinguishes a reference regardless of which side filed it. The state's litigating machinery gets no special indulgence. A reference the department files and then forgets dies exactly the same death as a taxpayer's forgotten reference.
For taxpayers and their advisers, there is a practical angle beyond schadenfreude. If the department has filed a reference against you and years have passed in silence, check the file's pulse — an unprosecuted departmental reference is a candidate for dismissal for non-prosecution, and this judgment (alongside the day's companion dismissals) is the precedent to cite. For the department's legal wing, the message is administrative: housekeeping is litigation strategy. File it, then fight it — or lose it.