“We can’t supply the material” – a shock given to the managing director of a leading pharmaceutical company which supplies lifesaving drugs to all big hospitals in the country. The reason – GST registration was cancelled, and e-way bills cannot be generated. The company has no clue, nor received any notice of any default or department intention to cancel the registration. The business so critical to healthcare services in the country has come to a standstill. What suddenly happened?
Service of a notice or an order is an
extremely critical event in tax litigation and has been a matter of dispute over past many years. Introduction of technology based GST
has just added another dimension to it.
Until now, taxpayers have, in many
cases, argued non receipt of a notice or an order as a bonafide ground of delay
in responding to the notice or filing of appeal. In a few cases, such arguments
were made even to cover the lapse on part of the taxpayer in responding to the
notice or filing the appeal within the stipulated timeline. The revenue
authorities were generally not able to establish service of notice/ order and
that too to the authorized person and hence, the said arguments were generally
upheld.
Two recent decisions by the Kerala High Court and one by the Madhya Pradesh
High Court are going to change this landscape completely. The GST law,
as much as it is driven by the technology, has specified manner of service of
notice/ order. The high courts have held that uploading of a notice or an order
on the common portal maintained by
GSTN is not only valid buy the only mode permissible under the law. If this is the legal position, the argument of non-receipt of a notice/
order simply goes out
of the discussion. Now, if a taxpayer
defaults in responding to the notice
or delays in filing
of an appeal within the prescribed statutory
timelines, the legal consequences
would follow. If delay is beyond the maximum period
allowed to be condoned under the GST law, the taxpayer would have no choice but to approach
the jurisdictional high court.
Given the approach
of the judiciary towards non-compliant taxpayers, the relief
may not be forthcoming.
It is, therefore, imperative for any
GST registered assessee to regularly visit the common portal maintained by the GSTN in order to retrieve
any communication from the GST authorities and respond
thereto within the stipulated timelines in order to avoid any unpleasant and avoidable complexities which could even result in bringing
his business to a complete halt.
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