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43. In these circumstances, I do not see how the ruling in R. V. IRC [1979] 3 All ER 385; [1980] 2 WLR 1 (CA) can help the petitioners. Indeed, to the contrary. For, applied to the facts here, the said ruling and in particular the observations therefrom extracted above renders the petitioners' efforts to avoid search and seizure all the more a difficult task.

44. One parts with this case with a sense of remorse. The professionals, such as the chartered accountants here, become involved should be a matter of concern not only to the profession itself but also to the community at large. No reform, no law, no administration can succeed without the co-operation of citizens with responsible avocations in different walks and fields of life. Misuse of intellectual ingenuity and financial wizardry can well frustrate efforts at revival of economy and can only encourage not the decline and fall but the rise and growth of underground economy thriving with underhand dealings and eating into the very vitals of the economic life of the country fracturing the very foundations of a sound economic structure. Parallel economy stands before us all like a colossus. Serious efforts are on to weaken the same and to ultimately (if possible) obliterate it. Though measures in that behalf in the past have been, more or less, lessons in futility, that is no reason at all to give up. On the contrary, that itself is a warrant for injecting more blood, more vigour and more dynamism to control and cure the cancerous growth. The reasons and the compulsions behind the search and seizure provisions are too obvious to all. Though not a talisman, these powers do serve in their own way to reach and get at the secreted profits, concealed wealth and tax-evaded amounts - in the process of bridging up, at least to an extent, the gap between evasion and compliance and, albeit indirectly, between poverty and affluence.