Supreme Court Curbs Mechanical Fraud Allegations in GST Section 74 Notices

The End of the “Bland Recital”

Summary: The article analyses the Supreme Court’s August 2026 rulings in Tata Steel Limited v. Union of India and M/s G.R. Infra Projects Limited v. State of Madhya Pradesh, which address the conditions for invoking the extended limitation under Section 74 of the CGST Act. The article explains that Section 73 governs non-fraud cases with the ordinary limitation period, whereas Section 74 applies where tax short-payment or wrongful ITC arises by reason of fraud, wilful misstatement or suppression of facts. According to the article, the Supreme Court held that merely reproducing these statutory expressions in a show cause notice is insufficient: the foundational facts supporting the allegation must emerge from the notice itself. Tata Steel also rejected a “protective” Section 74 notice issued as limitation approached and permitted fresh proceedings subject to foundational facts being stated and the applicable limitation. G.R. Infra further held that deficiencies in the notice cannot subsequently be cured through a counter-affidavit. The article places these rulings alongside CBIC Instruction No. 05/2023-GST and M/s Safecon Lifescience Private Limited v. Additional Commissioner Grade 2, and examines their implications for the distinction between Sections 73 and 74, drafting of GST notices, third-party intelligence, officer satisfaction and the higher-penalty framework under Section 74A from FY 2024-25.

I. Introduction

Within the space of eight days in August 2026, the Supreme Court of India — through the same Bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and K. Vinod Chandran — delivered two Reportable judgments that will, in all likelihood, reshape how show cause notices under Section 74 of the Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 are drafted, defended and challenged across the country.

M/s G.R. Infra Projects Limited v. State of Madhya Pradesh (Civil Appeal No. 11277 of 2026, decided 19.08.2026) and M/s Tata Steel Limited v. Union of India (Supreme Court) (2026 INSC 920, decided 25.08.2026) arise from entirely unconnected fact patterns — one a corporate steel major contesting a CAG-audit-triggered notice, the other a Ratlam-based infrastructure company facing a departmental investigation notice — yet they converge on an identical legal defect and are resolved by an identical principle. Read together, they do more than dispose of two appeals. They operationalise, for the first time at the Supreme Court level, a threshold administrative-law requirement that had until now existed mainly as departmental instruction and scattered High Court precedent: that the extended period of limitation under Section 74 cannot be invoked by mechanically reciting the words “fraud”, “wilful misstatement” or “suppression of facts”. The notice must do the work itself. These two judgments did not arrive unheralded. Five weeks earlier, a differently constituted Bench had declined to entertain the Revenue’s challenge to the Allahabad High Court’s judgment in M/s Safecon Lifescience Private Limited v. Additional Commissioner Grade 2 a decision that had already quashed Section 74 proceedings for want of the statutory ingredients. The three decisions together form a coherent and now difficult-to-displace line of authority, and this article treats them as such. The article traces the reasoning in Tata Steel and G.R. Infra, situates them within the framework of CBIC Instruction No. 05/2023-GST, restates the propositions affirmed through Safecon as formal legal principles, distils a working test for what counts as sufficient “foundational facts”, and assesses the likely trajectory of GST adjudication and litigation going forward.

II. The Statutory Architecture: Why Section 73 and Section 74 Are Not Interchangeable

The CGST Act draws a deliberate and consequential line between two adjudication tracks for unpaid or short-paid tax, wrongly availed input tax credit, or erroneous refunds:

• Section 73 applies where the shortfall arises for reasons other than fraud, wilful misstatement or suppression of facts to evade tax. It carries a three-year limitation period, running from the due date of furnishing the annual return for the relevant financial year, within which the adjudication order must be passed (Section 73(10)), with the notice itself required at least three months prior to that outer limit (Section 73(2)).
• Section 74 applies only where such fraud, wilful misstatement or suppression is alleged and made out. It extends the limitation to five years (Section 74(10)), requires the notice to issue at least six months before that outer limit (Section 74(2)), and carries materially harsher consequences a mandatory penalty regime under Section 74(5)/(9) equal to the tax, as opposed to the more lenient structure under Section 73(8)/(11). The five-year window and elevated penalty exposure under Section 74 are not incidental; they are the statutory quid pro quo for an allegation of dishonesty.

Section 74(1) is, in its own terms, conditional: it applies where tax has not been paid or credit has been wrongly availed “by reason of” fraud, wilful misstatement or suppression. The phrase imports causation. It follows, as a matter of first principle, that the provision cannot be triggered as a matter of administrative convenience once the ordinary three-year window has lapsed. Yet that is precisely the pattern both judgments confront: a Section 73 limitation that has already expired, followed by a Section 74 notice reaching for the extended period, using the statutory vocabulary of fraud and suppression without the substance behind it.

III. Tata Steel: The Facts and the Reasoning

A. Background

Tata Steel Limited received a Show Cause Notice dated 13.06.2025 for three financial years 2018-19 to 2020-21 issued, on its face, under Section 74, and traceable to an audit objection raised by the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India. The Jharkhand High Court (Neutral Citation 2026:JHHC:11878-DB, judgment dated 23.04.2026) had declined to interfere, holding that the officer’s satisfaction could be tested on the merits in adjudication. The appellant’s core contention before the Supreme Court was straightforward: there was no allegation of fraud, wilful misstatement or suppression capable of sustaining Section 74; further, the proper officer himself appeared unconvinced by the audit objection, having transferred the matter to the departmental “call book” (kept in abeyance) only for the notice to be revived once limitation was on the point of closing, framed by the Revenue as a “protective” measure.

B. The Limitation Calculation

The Court undertook a granular, formulaic computation of limitation a methodology of independent utility to practitioners quite apart from the substantive holding: Under Section 44(1) read with Rule 80 of the CGST Rules, the annual return for each financial year is ordinarily due by 31st December following that year. Successive notifications extended these deadlines in the early GST years to account for systemic teething troubles, pushing the effective due dates for FY 2018-19, 2019-20 and 2020- 21 to 31.12.2020, 31.03.2021 and 28.02.2022 respectively. Three years from each of those dates would ordinarily exhaust Section 73 limitation on 31.12.2023, 31.03.2024 and 28.02.2025. The Supreme Court’s own suo motu COVID-19 limitation order (In Re: Cognizance for Extension of Limitation, disposed of 10.01.2022) excluded the period 15.03.2020 to 28.02.2022 from all limitation computations. Applying that exclusion, the Section 73 limitation for all three years was found to converge on 28.02.2025. The SCN dated 13.06.2025 was therefore admittedly beyond the Section 73 window for every year in question — which is precisely why the Revenue needed Section 74 to survive.

C. The Substantive Holding

Having established that Section 73 had lapsed, the Court turned to whether Section 74 could rescue the notice. It could not, for reasons that go to the heart of what a valid Section 74 notice must contain:

1. First, satisfaction under Section 74 must be formed before the notice issues, not asserted after the fact. An audit objection is raw material for inquiry; it is not, by itself, the officer’s satisfaction that fraud or suppression occurred.

2. Second, and most significantly, the Court held that the SCN contained no more than “a bland statement” that the appellant had availed ITC “without documentary evidence and suppressed the facts” with no foundational facts stated to validate the allegation. The Court was explicit that “the words are not to be mechanically recited in the notice to enable recovery outside the normal limitation provided under the statute.”

3. Third, the fact that the Department itself had transferred the SCN to the “call book” and separately contested the underlying audit objection before the Public Accounts Committee was read as affirmative evidence that the Department had not, in truth, reached the state of satisfaction Section 74 demands.

4. Fourth, the Court flatly rejected the concept of a “protective” Section 74 notice — issued defensively as limitation closes, with the fraud/suppression case to be built out later during adjudication holding this device to be “alien to the GST regime”.

5. Fifth, the Revenue’s reliance on Explanation 2 to Section 74 (as it stood before its omission with effect from 01.11.2024) to expand the meaning of suppression was rejected as “fallacious” on the simple ground that the Explanation no longer existed at the relevant time.

The Court set aside both the SCN and the consequential Order-in-Original dated 26.12.2025, while granting the Department liberty to initiate fresh Section 74 proceedings — provided the foundational facts are stated in the notice itself — before the extended-period outer limit of 28.02.2027.

IV. G.R. Infra Projects: The Companion Judgment

Decided six days earlier by the identical Bench, G.R. Infra Projects is not a parallel line of authority; it is the doctrinal twin of Tata Steel, and in several respects sharpens the principle further.

A. Facts

G.R. Infra Projects Limited, Ratlam, faced a Section 74 SCN dated 13.06.2025 for FY 2018-19, following a departmental investigation that began with summons for financial years 2017-18 to 2020-21, an inspection at the company’s premises, and statements recorded from its accountant, authorised signatory and director. Unlike Tata Steel, this was not merely an audit-driven notice: there was an active investigative record, including a draft notice-cum-investigation report dated 03.03.2025 and an intimation under Section 142(1A). The State’s position was correspondingly stronger on paper. This was not a dormant audit objection revived at the last minute, but a notice preceded by genuine investigative activity.

B. The Limitation Calculation

The Court applied the identical methodology as in Tata Steel: annual return due date for FY 2018-19 extended to 31.12.2020, three-year Section 73 window, COVID exclusion applied, yielding an extended Section 73 deadline of 28.02.2025 again, before the 13.06.2025 SCN.

C. The Substantive Holding — and Its Sharper Edges

Despite the more substantial investigative record behind it, the notice itself failed the same test. The Court’s language here is worth setting out, because it is likely to be the most frequently quoted passage from either judgment in future litigation:

“A bare reading of the notice would indicate that but for a bland statement of ‘fraud or concealment of facts’ nothing is stated as to how fraud was inferred or concealment of facts were detected. In fact, the ‘or’ employed indicates that even the assessing officer was not sure that the assessment was proceeded by reason of fraud or on the ground of concealment of facts. What is required for the extended time to be applied are the allegations, which lead to the inference of a fraud or the concealment as attempted by the assessee resulting in suppression of facts, should emanate from the notice itself. It cannot be a mechanical use of the words ‘fraud, willful misstatement or suppression of facts’ without listing out the aspects which persuades the assessing officer to conclude that there has been employed either of these surreptitious devices by the assessee.”

Two elements of this passage deserve particular attention. The Court treated the disjunctive framing itself “fraud or concealment” as affirmative evidence of the officer’s own uncertainty, rather than as a harmless drafting shorthand covering multiple bases. And the Court insisted that the allegations not merely the conclusion “should emanate from the notice itself”.

The second, and arguably more consequential, holding concerns the State’s attempt to rely on its counter-affidavit before the Court to supplement the thin notice with the fuller investigative narrative. The Court refused to look at it, on what it called a “trite principle”:

“…when an authority has issued a notice or an order, the requirements to make the notice or order valid should be contained in such notice or order and cannot be supplanted by a counter affidavit in Court, where the notice or order is alleged to be invalid for reason to non-application of mind…”

The principle is indeed trite, and its pedigree matters for how it will be applied. It is the rule in Mohinder Singh Gill v. Chief Election Commissioner, (1978) 1 SCC 405, that a statutory order must be judged by the reasons it contains and cannot be supplemented by fresh reasons in the shape of an affidavit or otherwise. In the tax context specifically, the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the show cause notice is the foundation on which the Department must build its case and that the adjudication cannot travel beyond it: Commissioner of Central Excise, Nagpur v. Ballarpur Industries Ltd., (2007) 8 SCC 89; Commissioner of Customs v. Brindavan Beverages (P) Ltd., (2007) 5 SCC 388. G.R. Infra applies that settled rule at an earlier point in the process the notice stage and to a different document the counter-affidavit in writ proceedings.

This closes off what has, until now, been a common departmental litigation strategy: draft a lean SCN and, if challenged, use the writ counter-affidavit to retroactively narrate the suppression case in full. G.R. Infra forecloses that route as a matter of principle, not merely on the facts of that case.

The Court set aside both the notice and the Madhya Pradesh High Court judgment that had upheld it, finding “absolutely no reason” to sustain the SCN, and directed the State to desist from further proceedings pursuant to it.

V. The Administrative-Law Backdrop: CBIC Instruction No. 05/2023-GST

Neither judgment writes on a blank slate. Both vindicate, at the highest judicial level, a position CBIC itself had already staked out — and it is worth tracing that lineage, because it strengthens the argument that this is not a new judicial innovation but the enforcement of an existing administrative commitment.

Instruction No. 05/2023-GST, dated 13.12.2023, was issued in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Commissioner of Customs, Central Excise and Service Tax, Bangalore (Adjudication) v. Northern Operating Systems Private Limited (Civil Appeal Nos. 2289–2293 of 2021, decided 19.05.2022) a Service Tax case on the taxability of secondment arrangements, whose implications CBIC chose to extend proactively into the GST context. The Instruction directed field formations that Section 74(1) “can only be invoked if there is evidence of fraud, wilful misstatement, or suppression of facts to evade tax”, that “mere non-payment of GST” without these elements cannot trigger the provision, and — critically — that such evidence “should be expressly included in the show cause notice”.

Two points about the Instruction’s legal status deserve emphasis. First, it is issued under Section 168 of the CGST Act, and instructions so issued bind the officers to whom they are addressed. Secondly, the Department cannot be heard to act contrary to its own circulars and instructions: Paper Products Ltd. v. Commissioner of Central Excise, (1999) 7 SCC 84; Collector of Central Excise, Vadodara v. Dhiren Chemical Industries, (2002) 2 SCC 127. A notice that recites the statutory words without the evidence the Instruction requires is therefore defective on two independent footings — statutory and administrative — even before Tata Steel and G.R. Infra are reached.

The Instruction found early judicial traction in the Allahabad High Court. In M/s Safecon Lifescience Private Limited v. Additional Commissioner Grade 2 and Another (Neutral Citation 2025:AHC:158800; reported 2025 (9) TMI 919), the Court quashed Section 74 orders founded on unverified intelligence reports and a supplier’s registration cancellation, holding that Section 74 proceedings cannot be sustained absent evidence of fraud, wilful misstatement or suppression with intent to evade tax, and expressly invoking the necessity of mens rea and strict compliance with the Instruction. The subsequent history of that judgment, and the propositions it settles, are examined in Part VI.

Tata Steel and G.R. Infra complete this arc. What began as a departmental instruction confined to secondment disputes, and was then applied by High Courts to a broader class of Section 74 notices, has now been affirmed by the Supreme Court as a matter of statutory construction of Section 74 itself placing it beyond the reach of contrary departmental practice or inconsistent Tribunal decisions, and giving it the force of binding precedent under Article 141 of the Constitution.

VI. The Third Pillar: Safecon Lifescience and the Propositions It Settles

A. Procedural History and Precedential Weight

The Allahabad High Court in Safecon quashed the Order-in-Appeal dated 20.12.2022 of the Additional Commissioner, Grade-2 (Appeal)-II, State Tax, Agra, and the underlying adjudication order dated 12.01.2022, both of which had denied ITC to the petitioner — a wholesale trader and manufacturer of medicines — on purchases made in April 2021 from a Maharashtra supplier whose registration was subsequently cancelled. The State carried the matter to the Supreme Court. In Additional Commissioner, Grade 2 and Another v. M/s Safecon Lifesciences Private Limited, SLP (C) No. 23993 of 2026, order dated 17.07.2026 (Aravind Kumar and Vipul M. Pancholi, JJ.; reported 2026 (7) TMI 1276), the Court condoned the delay but dismissed the petition, finding no good ground to entertain it. The precedential character of that order must be stated with precision. A dismissal of a special leave petition in limine, by a non-speaking order, neither attracts the doctrine of merger nor constitutes a declaration of law under Article 141: Kunhayammed v. State of Kerala, (2000) 6 SCC 359; Khoday Distilleries Ltd. v. Sri Mahadeshwara Sahakara Sakkare Karkhane Ltd., (2019) 4 SCC 376. The High Court’s judgment therefore stands on its own authority, undisturbed rather than affirmed. That said, three consequences follow which are of practical significance. The judgment is binding on all authorities and tribunals within Uttar Pradesh. The Revenue’s own challenge to its reasoning has been tested at the apex level and has failed. And the substantive principle it applies has, within weeks, been independently adopted by a reasoned Supreme Court judgment in Tata Steel and G.R. Infra. The result is a three-tier chain of authority Allahabad High Court, Supreme Court declining interference, Supreme Court on the merits which the Revenue will find difficult to dislodge in argument.

B. The Propositions Affirmed

Read with Tata Steel and G.R. Infra, the Safecon line of authority yields five propositions that can be stated in formal terms.

Proposition 1 Causation, not coexistence

Section 74(1) applies where tax has not been paid or credit has been wrongly availed “by reason of” fraud, wilful misstatement or suppression of facts. The phrase is one of causation. It is not satisfied by the coexistence of a shortfall and a suspicion of wrongdoing; the notice must disclose a causal nexus between the alleged culpable conduct and the specific demand raised. This is the textual anchor for the “foundational facts” requirement, and submissions are better framed around the statutory phrase itself than around judicial gloss alone.

Proposition 2 Third-party intelligence must be verified, linked and disclosed

Information received from another wing of the Department in Safecon, a report of the Central Intelligence Unit, Vadodara, flagging the supplier cannot be adopted wholesale against the recipient dealer. Before it can found a Section 74 demand it must be:

a. independently verified by the proper officer,

b. specifically linked to the taxpayer’s own transaction, and

c. disclosed to the taxpayer where relied upon, so that the noticee is not left meeting an invisible case.

The third limb is an application of the settled rule of natural justice that an assessee is entitled to be confronted with the material used against him and to rebut it: Dhakeswari Cotton Mills Ltd. v. Commissioner of Income Tax, AIR 1955 SC 65. It is a ground independent of the fraud/suppression threshold and is properly pleaded separately. It also shares a common foundation with the counter-affidavit bar in G.R. Infra: the case against the taxpayer must be visible at the notice stage, not reconstructed afterwards.

Proposition 3 Supplier-side doubt is not purchaser-side culpability

The High Court drew a sharp distinction between:

a. supplier being under a cloud cancelled registration, non-existence at the declared address, upstream default and

b. the purchaser itself having committed fraud, wilful misstatement or suppression.

Where the purchaser establishes a genuine transaction trail tax invoice, e-way bill, transport document, banking-channel payment, return filing and portal reflection supplier-side doubt, without more, does not establish the purchaser’s own culpable state of mind, and therefore cannot sustain a Section 74 proceeding against the purchaser. The Department’s remedy for a defaulting supplier lies against the supplier; Section 74 is not a vehicle for visiting that default on a bona fide recipient.

Proposition 4 The mens rea requirement has a settled pre-GST pedigree

The High Court anchored its reasoning in Continental Foundation Joint Venture Holding v. Commissioner of Central Excise, Chandigarh-I, (2007) 10 SCC 337, decided under the analogous extended-limitation provision in Section 11A of the Central Excise Act, 1944. That decision holds that a mere omission to disclose is not “suppression” unless it is deliberate and intended to evade payment, and that an incorrect statement is not automatically a “wilful misstatement”. The line runs further back Pushpam Pharmaceuticals Co. v. Collector of Central Excise, 1995 Supp (3) SCC 462; Anand Nishikawa Co. Ltd. v. Commissioner of Central Excise, (2005) 7 SCC 749; Uniworth Textiles Ltd. v. Commissioner of Central Excise, (2013) 9 SCC 753 and establishes that the deliberate-intent requirement is not a novel GST-era construction but a settled principle of Indian indirect-tax law which Parliament is presumed to have adopted when it re-enacted the same vocabulary in Section 74. The point carries particular weight before a Bench more receptive to entrenched excise-law principle than to developing GST precedent.

Proposition 5 Companion Allahabad authority

Khurja Scrap Trading Co. v. Additional Commissioner Grade-2 (Appeal), 2025 (9) TMI 53, also of the Allahabad High Court and also applying Instruction No. 05/2023-GST, holds that where the selling dealer was registered at the time of the transaction and the purchaser has produced the primary documents, an adverse inference cannot be drawn mechanically. It was expressly relied upon in Safecon itself. Within the jurisdiction it supplies a second, independent and coordinate-Bench authority for the same principle, and is properly cited alongside Safecon for weight of authority.

VII. Distilling the Elements: What Must a Valid Section 74 Notice Contain?

Neither judgment purports to lay down a formal, codified checklist. Both are, in the classical common-law manner, reasoned from their own facts, and the Court was careful to illustrate insufficiency rather than prescribe sufficiency in the abstract. That restraint is itself doctrinally significant: a codified test would invite the Department to draft around it, satisfying form without substance. What follows, therefore, is not a rule the Court announced, but a set of elements distilled from what the Court found wanting in both notices offered as a practical, though non-exhaustive, working framework.

Read together, the judgments suggest that a Section 74 notice must disclose, on its face:

1. The specific act or omission alleged the underlying conduct, not the legal label. What, precisely, was concealed, misstated or fraudulently done — not merely that “suppression” occurred.

2. The evidentiary basis for the allegation — the document, record, discrepancy or statement that grounded the officer’s inference, sufficiently identified that the noticee can test and rebut it. Where that material originates from a third-party or intelligence source, it must have been verified and must be disclosed (Proposition 2 above).

3. A causal link between the alleged conduct and the specific shortfall demanded — the “by reason of” requirement (Proposition 1 above): not merely the coexistence of a shortfall and a suspicion of wrongdoing, but a stated connection between the two.

4. A single, determinate ground of fraud, or wilful misstatement, or suppression, chosen and reasoned rather than an unresolved disjunctive recitation of all three, which G.R. Infra treated as itself indicative of non-application of mind.

5. Evidence of independent officer satisfaction language showing the proper officer engaged with and formed a view on the underlying material, rather than adopting an audit paragraph, intelligence report or investigation report verbatim.

The absence of any single element appears, on the reasoning in both judgments, sufficient by itself to defeat the extended-period invocation; the requirement is conjunctive rather than a matter of overall balance.

Illustrating the Standard Insufficient (the pattern struck down in both judgments)

“On scrutiny of records and audit objections, it appears that the taxpayer has availed ITC without documentary evidence and suppressed the facts from the Department, with intent to evade tax. The taxpayer has thus contravened the provisions of the Act by reason of fraud or wilful misstatement or suppression of facts, and is liable to be proceeded against under Section 74 of the Act.”

This fails on nearly every element: no specific act identified, no evidentiary reference, no causal link to the quantified demand, a disjunctive and therefore indeterminate ground, and no visible sign of independent satisfaction beyond restating the audit trigger.

The contrast is not one of length or formality but of content: a specific transaction, named and annexed evidence, a stated causal chain, one determinate ground, and language of independent satisfaction.

VIII. Implications for Pending and Future Litigation

A. Notices grounded in estimation rather than transaction-specific evidence

A significant category of Section 74 and Section 74A litigation currently before the High Courts, including a large volume of brick-kiln and similar matters before the Allahabad High Court, proceeds not from an identified concealed transaction but from an estimation methodology: turnover reconstructed from fuel-consumption ratios, kiln capacity or conversion norms, with suppression then asserted as the explanation for the resulting shortfall. Tata Steel and G.R. Infra create a real difficulty for this pattern. An estimation exercise can demonstrate a discrepancy; it does not, without more, demonstrate that the discrepancy was caused by suppression rather than by a bona fide difference over valuation or measurement methodology. Element (3) of the framework above the causal link is likely to be the weakest point in such notices, and is a natural focus for challenge.

B. The counter-affidavit bar changes writ strategy

G.R. Infra’s refusal to consider the State’s counter-affidavit as a cure for a defective notice is, in practical terms, the more far-reaching of the two holdings for ongoing litigation. It removes a standard departmental response to writ challenges — filing a detailed counter narrating the suppression case that was never stated in the SCN and confines judicial review strictly to the four corners of the notice as issued. Petitioners can now resist any attempt by the Revenue to “explain” a thin notice through later pleadings, and can press courts to decide validity solely on the notice’s own text.

C. The end of “protective” notices

The rejection of protective Section 74 notices in Tata Steel removes a specific and recurring departmental tactic issuing an SCN as limitation closes, with the intention of developing the suppression case during adjudication rather than at the threshold. This tactic will no longer withstand challenge, and notices that read as defensive rather than considered are now vulnerable on that basis alone.

D. Application to Section 74A

For financial years from 2024-25 onwards, Sections 73 and 74 have been replaced by a unified Section 74A, under which the period for issuing a notice is the same whether or not fraud is alleged. The extended-limitation consequence of the fraud/suppression characterisation therefore falls away. The characterisation itself, however, remains decisive: it determines whether penalty is levied under Section 74A(5)(i) or the far heavier Section 74A(5)(ii). The reasoning in Tata Steel and G.R. Infra is not confined to limitation. It rests on the meaning of the statutory words and on the requirement that the officer’s satisfaction be formed and stated in the notice. Both premises apply with equal force to a notice invoking Section 74A(5)(ii), and there is no principled reason why a bland recital of fraud should suffice to attract the higher penalty when it does not suffice to attract the longer limitation.

E. What remains open

Neither judgment defines precisely how much particularity suffices; both illustrate insufficiency, not the floor of sufficiency. Departments will likely respond by elaborating their notices with more detailed suppression narratives, generating a further wave of litigation testing how much factual specificity actually satisfies the standard, and where the line falls between adequate particularity and material that properly belongs in adjudication rather than in the notice. The boundary between Sections 73 and 74 in the post–Explanation 2 landscape — where “suppression” is no longer statutorily defined to include mere non-declaration — also remains to be fully worked out, since both Benches found it unnecessary to resolve that question on the facts before them. On this point the pre-GST authorities collected under Proposition 4 above are likely to supply the answer.

IX. Conclusion

Tata Steel and G.R. Infra Projects mark a shift from a limitation-and-ingredients inquiry conducted largely at the adjudication or appellate stage to a pleading-standard requirement enforceable at the threshold closer in spirit to the “reason to believe” jurisprudence under income-tax reassessment law than to prior GST case law on Section 74, which more often turned on whether the underlying facts supported fraud or suppression rather than on whether the notice itself said enough. Combined with CBIC’s own Instruction No. 05/2023-GST now vindicated rather than merely persuasive — the undisturbed Safecon line of authority within Uttar Pradesh, and the counter-affidavit bar from G.R. Infra, the judgments together give taxpayers and their counsel a considerably sharper and earlier point of challenge: not “did suppression occur”, but “did the notice say so, with the facts to show it, before this litigation began”.

For an adjudicating machinery that has, for several years, treated the statutory vocabulary of fraud and suppression as largely formulaic, the message from this Bench is unambiguous: the facts must earn the words. They are to be stated, not merely recited, to unlock five years instead of three.