The Calcutta High Court (HC) bench of Justice Md. Nizamuddin dismissed the writ petition against the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Appellate Authority for Advance Ruling (AAR) on ground that there is no reason to invoke the Article 226 of Constitution of India.
The writ petition was against the impugned order of the West Bengal Appellate Authority for Advance Ruling on two reliefs that is to declare the circular issued by the Ministry of Finance Unconstitutional and also to set aside the impugned order of West Bengal AAAR.
The primary issue in the current writ petition relates to classification disputes of the in-question product and the refusal by the relevant authority to take into account the petitioner’s request for permission to change the classification of the Tariff head of its identical product under the Central Excise Tariff Act following the introduction of the GST Act, 2017.
Before the Goods and Services Tax Act of 2017 was passed, the petitioner voluntarily listed its finished goods under Chapter Heading 3923 29 90 of the Central Excise Tariff Act of 1985 and received the Duty Drawback.
Except for the fact that the tax rate on the same product under the same tariff heading is higher under the newly implemented GST regime, the petitioner has not provided a convincing argument for why and how the tariff heading of a product with the same composition and involving the same manufacturing process should be changed from classification 3923 29 90 to 6305 33 00.
The bench remarked that the petitioner in the course of hearing of this writ petition did not press for its prayer in the writ petition relating to challenging the constitutional validity of the impugned circular.
The bench observed that there is no jurisdictional issue or any natural justice violation occurred in the instant case to invoke constitutional writ jurisdiction. It was also noted that every procedure was in accordance with law.
The court, acting within its competence under Article 226 of the Indian Constitution was reluctant to grant the petitioner’s request to modify the classification of the Tariff Heading in order to benefit from a cheaper tariff rate under the GST regime.
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