Delhi High Court: Refund Application Could Not Be Uploaded Due To Technical Glitches, Refund Can Not Be Denied

The Delhi High Court in the case M/S Sethi Sons (India) Versus Assistant Commissioner And Ors. observed and has held that the refund application was filed twice on the GST portal but could not be uploaded due to technical glitches.
The bench comprising of Justice Vibhu Bakhru and Justice Amit Mahajan in the case observed and has stated that during the initial period of the rollout of the GST regime, both taxpayers and the officials of the GST departments faced innumerable difficulties that were being addressed.
The court stated that some of the difficulties still persist and are being addressed and, in this environment, it is not difficult to accept that a taxpayer would have sought advice from the jurisdictional officers. Thus, the petitioner acted in the a bona fide manner.
In the present case, the petitioner or assessee challenged the denial of refund of unutilized input tax credit, ITC accumulated in respect of the Goods and Services Tax paid on inputs in respect of the zero-rated supplies—goods exported without payment of IGST.
The petitioner in the plea claimed that he made several efforts to manually submit his application.
The court stated that the concerned officer declined to accept it and the assertion is disputed by the respondents or department, as the respondents do not have any record of the same.
The petitioner in the plea contended before the court that the authorities had completely ignored the technical glitches and errors encountered by the petitioner initially at the time of filing monthly refund applications. Thus, the applications were within time; however, the petitioner could not complete the filing without any fault on its part.
Therefore, the claim of the petitioner could not be rejected on the ground of limitation.
On the other hand, the department contended before the court that the petitioner had faced technical issues in uploading the refund applications. Thus, a ticket in respect of the petitioner’s complaint was also issued on August 8, 2018.
Further, the court observed that the petitioner did not file any claim for a refund thereafter and he had done so almost one and a half years later, on February 5, 2020. Thus, there being no impediment for the petitioner to file its claim for a refund and to address the issues, provisions were made to accept applications and returns manually.
Therefore, the window was open till September 26, 2019. Thus, the respondent also disputed the submissions that the petitioner was advised by the Jurisdictional GST Office to file a refund claim after filing the annual GST returns in Form 9 and obtaining the bank realization certificates.
The court while considering the facts and circumstances of the case observed and has held that if the taxpayer has made a bona fide attempt to make an application but was prevented from doing so on account of technical glitches or for any reason attributable to GST authorities, its claim for refund cannot be denied on account of delay.
The counsel, Advocate Aseem Chawla appeared for the Petitioner.
The counsel, Advocate Vijay Joshi represented the respondent.