Advance Ruling Authority has No Jurisdiction to determine ‘Place of Supply’: AAR [Read Order]

The Kerala State Advance Ruling Authority ( AAR ) has held that it has no jurisdiction to determine the ‘place of supply’ under the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Act.

M/s. Sutherland Mortgage Service Inc., USA has branch offices in India at Cochin, Mumbai and Chennai. The applicant is engaged in the business of providing information technology enables services such as mortgage orientation, primary servicing, special servicing, cash management and analytics and reporting. The Head Office prevented outsourcing of its work to any other third party. Therefore, M/s. Sutherland Mortgage Services Inc. India is entered into an inter-company agreement with the M/s. Sutherland Mortgage Services Inc. USA for providing services to the customers located outside India. The inter-company agreement is entered only for the purpose of transfer pricing regulation as the branch has no legal separate entity. M/s. Sutherland Mortgage Services Inc. USA has also entered into an agreement with customers outside India for providing the services from USA and India branch. M/s. Sutherland Mortgage Services Inc. USA is reimbursing the branch at India for the costs incurred to perform the services and branch issues commercial invoice to Head Office at USA.

The applicant submitted that M/s. Sutherland Mortgage Services Inc. India Branch has provided the services to the customers located outside India and not to Head Office and therefore services would qualify as export of services, which is considered as zero-rated supply in terms of Section 16 of the IGST Act.

“This authority has been constituted in exercise of the powers conferred by section 96 of the Kerala Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017, which Act extends to the whole of the state of Kerala. This authority is a creature of statute and has to function within the legal boundary mandated by the Act. As the ‘place of supply’ is not covered by Section 97(2) of the Acts, this authority is helpless to answer the question raised in the application, as it is lacking jurisdiction to decide the. issues. The jurisdiction of this authority does not extend to the questions on determination of ‘place of supply’,” the authority said.