The Jharkhand High Court directed the GST Authority either to open a GSTN portal enabling the application for refund in GST RFD-01 or to manually accept the application for refund.
The petitioner, Atibir Industries Co. Ltd. is primarily engaged in manufacture of Sponge Iron falling within the jurisdiction of the state government. The petitioner requires ‘Coal’ as raw material from within the country through one or the other subsidiaries of Coal India Ltd. and also imports Coal from outside the country.
The petitioner being the manufacturer of Sponge Iron regularly exports goods outside the country without payment of export duty in terms of “Letter of Undertaking” issued in favour of the petitioner by the competent authority.
By virtue of the Circular dated 31st December 2018, it was clarified by CBIC that compensation cess can be claimed as ITC and unutilized compensation cess can be claimed as refund, the petitioner, on 4th March 2019, logged in on GSTN Portal for claiming refund by filing statutory Form GST RFD- 01 towards unutilized ITC at the hands of the petitioner on account of compensation cess for the financial year 2017-18.
When the petitioner logged in on GSTN Portal and filed GST RFD-01 Form for refund, even the claim of refund of the petitioner was computed in terms of Section 54(3) of the CGST/SGST Act, 2017 read with Rule 89 of the CGST/SGST Rules and a sum was determined as refundable to the petitioner for the financial year 2017-18 and the petitioner has stated that refund application in GST RFD-01 Form could not be submitted online by the petitioner on GSTN Portal, as the option of ‘Save’, ‘Review’ and ‘Submit’ as occurring on GSTN Portal did not get “Active”.
When the Petitioner was unable to upload its application the Petitioner, on the same day itself, made a complaint in the Helpdesk of GSTN Portal and the Petitioner was allotted Ticket Number.
In spite of allocation of said Ticket Number, no response was received by the Petitioner from the Helpdesk intimating the reason as to why the application for refund for the financial year 2017-18 was not being accepted on GSTN Portal.
Since the application for refund of the petitioner for the year 2017-18 was not accepted in the Online Portal due to aforesaid glitches in GSTN Portal, the petitioner itself, sent an E-mail to Goods and Service Tax Council requesting the said Council to intervene in the matter, but the petitioner did not receive any response.
The division bench of Justice Aparesh Kumar Singh and Justice Anubha Rawat Choudhary directed the respondents to either to open GSTN portal enabling the petitioner to file its application for refund in GST RFD-01 or to manually accept the application for refund of the petitioner pertaining to the period 2017-18 and 2018-19 in respect of its claim for refund of unutilized Input Tax Credit pertaining to compensation cess within a period of one month.
The court further directed that the respondent authority to communicate the petitioner through e-mail as to whether they would open the GSTN portal or would accept the refund applications manually and upon such communication, the petitioner will be entitled to avail of the opportunity to file applications for refund of compensation cess for the financial years 2017-18 and 2018-19 within a period of 15 days from such communication.
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