Delhi High Court: A Division Bench of S. Muralidhar and Talwant Singh, JJ. allowed a writ petition filed by a car dealer who sought directions authorities to allow them to filed GST TRAN-1 Form beyond the due date.
The petitioner was registered under Central Goods and Services Act, 2017. They prayed for a direction to the respondents to permit them to file the GST TRAN-1 manually and allow the credit of Input Tax Credit (“ITC”) as claimed in accordance with Section 140(3) of the CGST ACT, 2017, in its online electronic credit ledger for payment of its output liability under the GST Laws.
It was submitted that in terms of Rule 117 of the CGST Rules, 2017, the GST TRAN-1 Form was required to be filed by 30-09-2017. Later, this time limit was extended till 30-11-2017 and then till 27-11-2017. The petitioner stated that in view of the maze of compliance due dates, coupled with the time extended for filing the GSTR-1 Form to 31-12-2017, the accountant of the petitioner missed noticing that the time for filing GST TRAN-1 Form was extended only till 27-12-2017. The petitioner was accordingly not able to file the GST TRAN-1 declaration online within time and claim the ITC of the eligible amounts.
The petitioner was represented by Aseem Mehrotra and M.K. Gandhi, Advocates. Per contra, Anurag Ahluwalia, Central Government Standing Counsel, along with Kartikeya Rastogi and Abhigyan Siddhant, Advocates represented the Union of India. The Customs was represented by Harpreet Singh and Satyakam, Advocates.
The High Court noted that it has, in a series of the earlier order, recognised the difficulties faced by the tax payer in filing the GST TRAN-1 Form within 27-12-2017. In some of those cases, the inability was due to technical glitches.
In such view of the matter, the court issued a direction to the respondents to permit the petitioner to either submit the GST TRAN-1 Form electronically by opening the electronic portal for that purpose or allow the petitioner to tender the same manually on or before 15-10-2019, and thereafter, process the petitioner’s claim ITC in accordance with law.[Krish Automotors (P) Ltd. v. Union of India, 2019 SCC OnLine Del 10090, decided on 16-09-2019]
