According to the appellant's position, since she did not receive tax advice before she reported to the respondent about the agreements signed between her and the ILA after she won the "Buyer's Price" tenders, which bore the title of a "lease contract", she assumed that it was the purchase of a "right in real estate" and thus she reported and paid purchase tax accordingly. However, during 2019, the appellant learned, through external tax experts, that there had been a legal error in its own assessments and that the rights purchased in the framework of the "Buyer's Price" tenders did not constitute a "right in real estate", within the meaning of this term in the Real Estate Taxation Law. Therefore, the appellant filed the motion to amend the assessment, within the time limit set in section 85(a) of the Law, on the ground of an error discovered in the assessment, in accordance with section 85(a)(3) of the Law. According to the law, a legal error is also included in this ground, and there is no need to examine or prove the reason for the error, but in any case, the appellant explained and proved the reason for her legal error.
The respondent's position, as presented in the framework of his written summaries of arguments, is that the request to amend the assessment was rejected because it does not meet the conditions of section 85(a) of the Law, since all the facts and data were known to the appellant at the time the self-assessments were submitted, and that in fact it is not a matter of amending the assessment in the usual sense, but rather classifying the transaction in a different way.
This is a request to cancel a self-assessment, which must be discussed sparingly and examined whether there is room at all to approve such requests. The Respondent argues that the principles according to which requests to amend an assessment such as this should be decided must be different from the principles established in relation to requests to amend an assessment under section 85 of the Law, and all the more so from the principles established in relation to decisions regarding the amendment of the assessment made by the Director by virtue of the said section. In his view, the request for amendment in this case should be examined in accordance with the principles set forth in case law and the Executive Instructions regarding the handling of requests to amend income tax reports – that is, to determine that there is no automatic right to amend, that approval of such requests will be made only in exceptional and rare cases, when the amendment is made due to a mistake in good faith, and that requests for amendment that are only an allegation of an error in the feasibility of the transaction should not be approved. The Respondent argues that the Appellant did not prove the existence of an "error" that justifies the correction of the self-assessments, because it refrained from bringing relevant witnesses, and in any case there is no "mistake" within the meaning of section 85(a)(3) of the Law.