Madras High court consists of Justice C. Saravanan ruled that the GST department can carry on the service of the physical copy of the notice via registered post, speed post, or courier with acknowledgement to the taxpayer at their known place of business or residence and upload the notice on the web portal. Once all the technical issues get solved then the practice of providing the physical copies might get end.
The applicant or taxpayer has questioned the assessment order and recovery proceedings given to the assessment orders on the basis of the assessment order has given without effective service of show cause notices under GST and without having enough opportunity to answer the show cause notices, violating the principles of natural justice.
Counsel for the department moreover specified that notices were uploaded on the web portal of the state government that is tngst.cid.tn.gov.in.
The notices and the additional orders were being uploaded on the web portal and get auto-populated on the GST web portal maintained by the union government. Thus the applicant can not mention that the show cause notices have been given. After the notices are auto-uploaded, the data would get present in the dashboards of the taxpayers and the registrants, and thus the same will not open for the applicant to mention that neither the show cause notice nor the order has been conveyed to them.
The court sees that the web portal which has been supported by the GST dept suffers issues on various steps and has been taken to rectify the technical glitches. Even as of date there were issues emerging out of the inter-communication amid the State GST and Central GST and web portals.
The court cancels out the concern to the department to pass an order speaking on the advantages and as per the law and rendered the applicants to furnish the answer to the show-cause notice.
