The Madras High Court, presided over by Justice C. Saravanan, ruled that the Goods and Service Tax (GST) department can continue to serve the physical copy of the notice to the assessee at their last known place of business or residence via registered mail, speed post, or courier with acknowledgment, and upload the notice to the web portal. Once all technical issues have been resolved, delivering physical copies may no longer be necessary.
The petitioners/assessees have challenged the assessment order and subsequent recovery proceedings on the grounds that the assessment orders were issued without proper service of Show Cause Notices and without providing adequate time to respond to the Show Cause Notices, resulting in a violation of natural justice principles.
Notices were posted on the State Government's web portal, tngst.cid.tn.gov.in, according to the department's counsel.
The notices and other instructions were also posted to the web portal and were auto-populated on the Central Government's GST web portal, according to the department's counsel. As a result, the petitioners were unable to claim that the show cause notifications were not served. Because information will be available on the assessees' and registrants' dashboards after the notices are auto-uploaded, the petitioners could not claim that neither the Show Cause Notice nor the order had been sent to them.
The court noted that the GST department's web interface had had technical difficulties on multiple occasions and that steps had been taken to fix them. Even now, there are issues with inter-communication between state GST and central GST, as well as web sites.
The court remanded the case to the department for a decision on the merits and in conformity with the law, and ordered the petitioners to respond to the Show Cause Notice.
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