Excise & Taxation Commissioner, Haryana has issued internal guidelines to all the Deputy Excise & Taxation Commissioners in Haryana, vide Memo[1] dated 30 October 2018.
The jurisdictional officers have been directed to use the functionality made applicable through Application Program Interface (API) released by Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN) for blocking/unblocking input tax credit (ITC) in the electronic credit ledger of the taxpayers under Goods and Services Tax (GST) in certain situations. The functionality shall be used in following situations:-
• The registered taxpayer is found to be bogus/fake as a result of any investigation or intelligence.
• The tax-paying entity is found non-functional.
• The taxpayer has claimed excess transitional credit through TRAN- 1/TRAN-2
• The supplies procured are not used in the course or furtherance of business.
• The credit is inadmissible in accordance with Section 17(5) and other relevant provisions of the Central Goods and Services Tax (CGST) Act.
Comments
Issuance of such guidelines for unilateral blocking of ITC could have far reaching implication and be susceptible to challenge. While the objective of the state government could be to safeguard the revenues, it may cause hardship to the taxpayer in genuine cases and lead to unwarranted litigation.
Since the instructions would be of binding nature, the jurisdictional authority may tend to follow the guidelines strictly and proceed to block the tax credits in the specified circumstances.
It will be interesting to see whether other states follow Haryana and implement similar process by developing backend application for blocking the ITC.
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