The GST Appellate Tribunal (GSTAT) Bar Association, Delhi, has represented to the CBIC seeking an extension of the statutory deadline for filing GST Tribunal appeals from 30 June 2026 to 31 December 2026 for orders communicated before 1 April 2026. The Association contends that persistent technical issues on the newly launched GSTAT e-filing portal—including payment gateway failures, Aadhaar authentication errors, DSC validation problems, upload restrictions, non-generation of temporary IDs, non-editable forms, lack of GSTN integration, and difficulties in uploading voluminous records—have prevented taxpayers from exercising their statutory right of appeal. It argues that the portal became operational only on 15 June 2026, leaving an unreasonably short filing window for a backlog of over 4.8 lakh appeals. The representation also requests suspension of recovery proceedings against affected taxpayers, a comprehensive technical audit of the portal, and administrative safeguards until the system becomes fully functional and accessible.
GST Appellate Tribunal Bar Association
AE-92, 2nd Floor, Shalimar Bagh, Delhi – 110088
Registration No. : S/012/RoS/CND/2026
Mobile : +91 9891468846, Email : membercarq@gstatbar.com
website : www.gstatbar.com
Ref. No. GSTATBAR/2026/005
Date: 20.06.2026
To,
The Chairman,
Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs,
Department of Revenue, Ministry of Finance,
Government of India, North Block,
New Delhi — 110001.
Subject: Representation for extension, from 30.06.2026 to 31.12.2026, of the statutory cut-off date notified vide F. No. A-50/7/2025-GSTAT-DoR dated 17.09.2025 (S.O. 4220(E)) under Section 112(1) of the Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017, for filing of appeals before the GST Appellate Tribunal — on account of persistent and unresolved technical infirmities of the GSTAT portal causing manifest hardship and denial of the statutory right of appeal.
Respected Sir,
1. Locus standi of the Association.
The GSTAT Bar Association, Delhi (`the Association’) is a duly constituted representative body of Advocates, Chartered Accountants and other tax professionals enrolled to practice before the Goods and Services Tax Appellate Tribunal (`GSTATV’ the Tribunal’), with its registered office at the address mentioned above. The Association is a recognised stakeholder body under the GST Appellate Tribunal (Procedure) Rules, 2025, and its locus standi to espouse the collective grievance of its members, and through them of the larger body of assessees they represent, is fortified by the law laid down by the Hon’ble Supreme Court in S.P. Gupta v. Union of India, (1981) Supp SCC 87, wherein it was authoritatively held that any person or body possessing sufficient interest is entitled to maintain an action for redressal of a public injury, more so where the grievance concerns denial of effective access to a statutory forum of adjudication. It is in this representative capacity, in furtherance of the collective professional and public interest, that the present representation is respectfully submitted, and not in any individual cause.
2. Statutory backdrop.
Vide Notification bearing F. No. A-50/7/2025-GSTAT-DoR dated 17.09.2025 (S.O. 4220(E)), issued in exercise of the power conferred by sub-section (1) of Section 1 12 of the Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 (‘the CGST Act’), and on the recommendation of the GST Council made at its 56th meeting held on 03.09.2025, the Central Government notified 30.06.2026 as the outer date up to which appeals in respect of orders communicated to the appellant before 01.04.2026 may be filed before the GSTAT. It is respectfully submitted that the said Notification was itself a product of the Government’s own recognition articulated through the Council’s recommendations – that the Tribunal, having remained non-functional for over nine years from the enactment of the CGST Act despite its constitution under Section 109 thereof, required a calibrated and staggered window to absorb the entire backlog of second appeals, estimated at over 4.8 lakh matters nationally against which only 20,111 appeals were filed by today. The Association submits, with the utmost respect, that the very rationale which persuaded the Government to grant this one-time window continues to subsist – and has, if anything, been aggravated – by reason of the persistent and substantial technical infirmities of the GSTAT e-filing portal (efiling.gstat.gov.in), none of which lie within the control of the taxpayer or his authorised representative, as elaborated in the grounds set out hereinbelow.
3. It is further submitted that under Section 1 12(8) of the CGST Act, a pre-deposit of ten per cent (10%) of the disputed tax amount, over and above the deposit made under Section 107(6) at the first appellate stage, is a mandatory jurisdictional condition precedent for maintainability of the second appeal. The Board itself, recognising the difficulty faced by taxpayers in complying with this requirement during the period when the Tribunal was yet to become operational, had issued an interim mechanism vide Circular No. 224/18/2024 GST dated 11.07.2024. The grievances articulated below demonstrate that infirmities of a closely analogous nature persist even at the present, post operationalisation stage.
GROUNDS
GROUND I – The Department’s own Advisory on online payment of court fees is, in substance, an admission of the payment-gateway infirmity, and offers no enforceable safeguard
It is submitted that the Department has itself issued an Advisory regarding online payment of court fees on the GSTAT portal (enclosed as Annexure B), which records, in terms, that where online payment has been made but the status is not reflected as ‘Success’: (i) the taxpayer fs fo wait &p fa 72 hours for the status to update; (ii) if the status does not update even thereafter, the system will not restrict or prevent filing; (iii) the taxpayer may proceed with filing without interruption; and (iv) the payment status shall be reconciled at the back end without adverse effect on the filing.
The Association submits, with respect, that this Advisory is, by itself, a candid and authoritative admission by the Department of the very Bharatkosh payment-gateway infirmity. More fundamentally, the Advisory is a mere administrative instruction having no statutory force under the CGST Act, the GSTAT Procedure Rules, 2025, or any notification issued thereunder; it is well settled that administrative circulars and instructions, howsoever salutary, cannot rewrite or substitute for the statute or the rules, and confer no independently enforceable right upon the taxpayer in the event the promised back-end reconciliation does not, in fact, materialise. A taxpayer whose appeal is, notwithstanding the Advisory, subsequently treated as deficient or time barred for want of a reconciled payment is left without remedy, since the Advisory creates an expectation without a corresponding statutory guarantee and therefore, it itself underscores the necessity of the extension and safeguards prayed for herein.
GROUND II – The mandatory checklist on the GSTAT portal travels beyond the requirements of the CGST Act and the Rules framed thereunder
It is submitted that several of the declarations and fields comprised in the mandatory checklist at the GSTAT Portal find no corresponding requirement either in Section 1 12 of the CGST Act or in the GSTAT Procedure Rules, 2025, and are, in substance, extra-statutory conditions superimposed by the portal’s own design.
It is a settled principle of administrative law that subordinate legislation and, a fortiori, a portal-level procedural prescription having even less statutory sanctity than a rule must conform to, and cannot travel beyond, the scope of the parent enactment. A checklist item unmoored from any statutory requirement, yet mandatorily insisted upon as a pre-condition to filing, is to that extent ultra vires and cannot be permitted to obstruct the substantive right of appeal conferred by Section 112.
GROUND III – Technical specifications such as 300 DPI scanning resolution and a 250-page document limit, nowhere prescribed under the Act, impose an unreasonable burden on tax professionals who are not, and cannot be expected to be, Information Technology professionals
It is submitted that’ the portal mandates document uploads to conform to a specific scanning resolution of 300 DPI and a per-document page 1imit of 250 pages, neither of which finds any mention whatsoever in the CGST Act, the GSTAT Procedure Rules, 2025, or any notification or circular issued thereunder. Such granular technical specifications, devised entirely at the portal’s back end, cannot reasonably be expected to be known> let alone complied with, by a tax professional whose domain expertise lies in tax law and litigation, and not in information technology or document engineering. A procedure that is just, fair and reasonable. A tax professional ought not to be held, nor in fact be capable of being held, to the standard of an Information Technology professional, and the imposition of such an undisclosed and disproportionate technical threshold renders the filing process oppressive and arbitrary qua an entire class of otherwise diligent and compliant appellants.
GROUND IV – Non-generation of Temporary ID in penalty matters under Section 122 read with Section 125
In matters involving penalty levied under Section 122 read with Section 125 of the CGST Act, the portal does not generate a Temporary Identification Number for the affected category of taxpayers, thereby foreclosing the very gateway for initiating the appeal process. The inability to even register on the forum, let alone file an appeal, amounts to a complete denial of the statutory right of appeal under Section 112, and calls for the justice-oriented approach.
GROUND V – Demand tab rendered uneditable upon submission
Once particulars in the ‘Demand’ tab of Form GST APL-05 are submitted on the portal, the same become permanently non-editable, even where a bona fide, inadvertent error requires correction before final submission. This rigidity, devoid of any provision for rectification, offends the rule of audi alteram partem and the broader principle that the maxim actus curiae neminem gravabit , “an act of the forum administering justice shall prejudice no one”, applies with equal force to a defect engineered by the portal’s own design and not by any fault of the appellant.
GROUND VI – The Act nowhere excludes filing of physical/hard copies of the appeal; an electronic-only filing regime devised by the Tribunal itself, without statutory warrant, amounts to a denial of the right of appeal and, in consequence, of justice itself
It is submitted, with the utmost respect but in the strongest terms, that neither Section 112 of the CGST Act nor any other provision thereof anywhere stipulates that an appeal before the GSTAT shall be maintainable only if filed electronically, to the exclusion of physical or hard-copy filing. The insistence on an electronic-only mode of filing is a creature of the Tribunal’s own procedural prescription, and not of the parent statute, and falls within the same vice of excess delegation.
Where the electronic mode is itself beset with substantial and unremedied infirmities, the foreclosure of any physical or manual fallback mechanism converts a procedural choice into a complete denial of the substantive right of appeal for the class of appellants who fall victim to those infirmities. Access to a forum of adjudication is not a matter of mere procedural convenience but is itself part of the guarantee of Article 14, and, in appropriate cases, Article 21 of the Constitution, as authoritatively held by the Hon’ble Supreme Court in various cases, where access to justice was recognised as a fundamental right in itself. The maxim ubi jus ibi remedium, “where there is a right, there is a remedy”, stands inverted on its head where the only prescribed remedy is rendered, by the remedy-giver’s own infrastructural failure, practically inaccessible: in such a state of affairs, no appeal is possible, and no appeal, in the plainest and most literal sense, means no justice; and justice withheld in this manner is justice denied as surely and as completely as if it had been refused outright.
GROUND VII – Repeated failure of Aadhaar authentication
Aadhaar-based authentication, intended to be a one-time, auto-populated exercise at the threshold of registration (the portal having itself fetched the taxpayer’s data from GSTN at the time of registration), is, on account of server side malfunction, required to be repeated eight to ten times within a single filing session, with complete Aadhaar particulars having to be manually re-entered on each occasion despite the data already being available with the system. Such repetitive, server-induced failure falls squarely within the mischief addressed by the Hon’ble Supreme Court in Union of India v. Filco Trade Centre Pvt. Ltd. , (2022) SCC OnLine SC 1006, wherein, taking judicial notice of technical glitches on the GST Network preventing taxpayers from availing ofa statutory right (transitional credit, in that case), the Apex Court directed reopening of the common portal for a further period of two months, holding in effect that a genuine technical inability to comply cannot be visited upon the taxpayer or permitted to defeat a substantive statutory right.
GROUND VIII – Bharatkosh payment gateway failures
The integration between the GSTAT portal and the Bharatkosh (Non-Tax Receipt Portal) gateway, through which both court fees and the Section 112(8) pre-deposit are required to be remitted, suffers from chronic latency, with sessions repeatedly timing out before the transaction can be completed despite multiple attempts. Where the appellant’s account is debited but no corresponding receipt is generated – a scenario expressly acknowledged in the portal’s own help documentation under the description ‘ Account Debited, but Payment Failed’ – the appellant is left remediless pending manual reconciliation, a delay wholly attributable to the Respondent’s own payment infrastructure and to no laches whatsoever on the part of the appellant.
GROUND IX – Non-availability of pre-deposit functionality for directors/partners
The mandatory pre-deposit under Section 1 12(8) cannot, as of date, be remitted by directors of companies or partners of firms who are very often the persons legally competent to operate the entity’s payment instruments. The relevant functionality being unavailable or non-responsive for such category of users. This persistence of difficulty, even after the Tribunal has purportedly become operational, defeats the very object of Circular No. 224/18/2024-GST dated 11.07.2024 (referred to in para 3 above), and renders the mandatory pre-deposit condition impossible of compliance for an entire category of bona fide appellants.
GROUND X – Non-synchronisation of GSTN and GSTAT databases
The data architecture of the GSTAT portal does not synchronise with that of the GST common portal administered by GSTN, with the result that particulars already available with the Department/GSTN like registration details, order particulars, ARN/CRN data which must be manually re-fed at the GSTAT portal, leading to duplication of effort, recurrent validation failures, and avoidable consumption of time within an already truncated limitation window. This sits uneasily with the object of an integrated and seamless Common Goods and Services Tax Electronic Portal contemplated under Section 146 of the CGST Act, and is contrary to the spirit of ‘ease of compliance’ repeatedly emphasised by the GST Council, including in its 56th meeting recommendations referred to in para 2 above.
GROUND XI – Difficulty in uploading voluminous paper-books
The portal’s upload functionality is configured with restrictive file-size upto 20/50mb and format limitations, rendering it practically unworkable to upload voluminous paper-books in complex matters involving multiple years, multiple show-cause notices, detailed reconciliations and judicial precedents and documents which the GSTAT Procedure Rules, 2025 themselves contemplate being filed along with the memorandum of appeal. The resultant repeated upload failures consume disproportionate time, more acutely for practitioners situated outside metropolitan centres with constrained internet infrastructure.
GROUND XII – DSC registration errors despite valid, subsisting registration
Practitioners and taxpayers attempting to digitally sign appeals through a validly registered Class III Digital Signature Certificate are confronted with a system error stating that the DSC stands ‘not registered’, notwithstanding that the very same DSC is duly registered and has been successfully used on the portal on prior occasions. This is a verifiable, recurring technical malfunction, attributable to no default of compliance on the part of the user, and forecloses the final and mandatory step of submission of an otherwise complete appeal.
GROUND XIII – Multiplication of the Authorised Representative’s particulars at the ‘ Add Representative’ stage, rendering self-induction impossible
At the stage of ‘ Add Representative’ on the portal, the name and enrolment number of the Authorised Representative (AR) is found to be reflected thrice in the very same drop-down/selection field, as a consequence whereof the AR is rendered unable to add herself as the authorised representative for the purpose of filing. This is a significant and self-evident lapse in the design of the portal, and directly impairs the right of a taxpayer to be represented by a person of his choice before a quasi-judicial forum and such right is statutorily embedded in Section 1 16 of the CGST Act, 2017. A portal-level defect that forecloses, rather than facilitates, the exercise of this right strikes at the very root of the filing process.
GROUND XIV- Complaints raised at GSTAT Portal are pending for more than 3 weeks
It is submitted that a formal complaint in respect of the aforesaid defect was duly lodged on the GSTAT portal’s grievance mechanism as far back as 26.05.2026, and that, despite the lapse of over three weeks as on the date of this representation, no resolution or even an interim workaround has been communicated by the Tribunal’s technical team. In the absence ofredressal, the taxpayer concerned stands completely foreclosed from filing the appeal and faces the real and imminent prospect of being rendered time-barred for no fault attributable to him. It bears emphasis that the law assists those who are vigilant of their rights, not those who sleep over them, inures squarely to the taxpayer’s benefit here: the grievance was raised promptly and within the limitation window itself, and the resultant prejudice flows entirely from the Respondent’s own failure to act upon a complaint of which it stands duly seized.
GROUND XV – Truncated window between launch of the portal and the statutory cut-off
As is duly borne out from the official flyer and the minutes of the inaugural proceedings of the launch programme, the GSTAT portal with detailed procedures was formally inaugurated only on 15.06.2026, a mere fifteen days prior to the statutory cut-off of 30.06.2026. This, notwithstanding that the Tribunal stood constituted as far back as 2017 under Section 109 of the CGST Act, and that its operationalisation has been an avowed legislative object of the GST regime for over nine years. A window of fifteen days for an entirely untested digital platform to be understood and operated by lakhs of taxpayers and professionals across the country, in respect of a backlog exceeding 4.8 lakh appeals, is manifestly unreasonable. The arbitrariness inherent in such a truncated window offends Article 14 of the Constitution where arbitrariness was held to be the very antithesis of equality, and disappoints the legitimate expectation of the trade and professional fraternity to a reasonable transition period.
GROUND XVI – The relief already granted is confined to scrutiny and does not address the anterior difficulty of filing
It is a matter of record, and one squarely within the Board’s own knowledge, that the difficulties faced by taxpayers and professionals on the GSTAT portal stand already partially acknowledged, inasmuch as the lenient scrutiny dispensation, under which defects of mere form not going to the merits are not insisted upon at the threshold, has itself been extended from 30.06.2026 to 31.12.2026
The Association submits, with respect, that this extension, salutary as far as it goes, addresses only the scrutiny of appeals that have already been filed, and does nothing whatsoever to redress the anterior and more fundamental difficulty, namely, the inability of taxpayers to file the appeal at all within the truncated window on account of the infirmities set out in above Grounds. The grant of relief at the scrutiny stage, without corresponding relief at the filing stage, is, with respect, incongruous and self-defeating, since a taxpayer who cannot complete the act of filing derives no comfort from a relaxed scrutiny of a filing that was never made. Far from militating against the present prayer, this circumstance constitutes the strongest internal corroboration of its merit, the Board having, in substance, already conceded the existence of system-level hardship warranting administrative relaxation.
CUMULATIVE SUBMISSION AND THE POWER OF THE BOARD TO GRANT RELIEF
1. Each of the grounds set out hereinabove, viewed individually or, a fort tori, cumulatively, establishes that the inability of the taxpaying and professional community to file appeals within the window ending 30.06.2026 stems not from any want of diligence on their part but from systemic and unrectified infirmities of the Respondent’s own digital infrastructure. The settled position in law is that where failure to exercise a statutory right within time is attributable to the inadequacy of the very mechanism through which that right is required to be exercised, equity leans firmly in favour of an extension of the prescribed window.
2. The Association is conscious that, under Section 112(6) of the CGST Act, the Tribunal possesses a limited power to condone delay in filing for a further period not exceeding three months, and that the Hon’ble Supreme Court in Singh Enterprises v. Commissioner of Central Excise, Jamshedpur, (2008) 3 SCC 70, and Commissioner of Customs & Central Excise v. Hongo India (P) Ltd., (2009) 5 SCC 791, has held that neither a Tribunal nor a Court can enlarge a period of limitation beyond what the statute itself permits. It is precisely for this reason that the Tribunal’s condonation power is both limited in degree and, more fundamentally, premised on an appeal having first been filed that the present representation is addressed to the Board. The remedy sought is not condonation of delay in a filed appeal, but an upstream extension, by the Government on the recommendation of the Council, of the cut-off date already notified under Section 1 12( 1), exactly as was done vide the Notification dated 17.09.2025 that fixed the present 30.06.2026 date. The power once exercised to grant a staggered window remains equally available, mutatis mutandis , to extend it further where, as here, the underlying rationale continues to subsist and has, if anything, been compounded by intervening and continuing technical failure.
PRAYER
In view of the foregoing facts, circumstances and submissions, the Association most respectfully prays that this Hon’ble Board may be pleased to:
(a) recommend to the GST Council, and thereafter notify under sub-section (1) of Section 1 12 of the CGST Act, 2017, an extension of the statutory cut-off date for filing of appeals before the GST Appellate Tribunal in respect of orders communicated before 01.04.2026, from 30.06.2026 to 3 1 . 12.2026;
(b) pending such extension, issue appropriate administrative instructions that no coercive or recovery action under Sections 78 and 79 of the CGST Act be initiated against taxpayers who are unable to file their appeals on or before 30.06.2026 on account of the technical infirmities of the GSTAT e-filing portal set out hereinabove;
(c) direct a time-bound technical audit and remediation of the pre-deposit, DSC-validation, Aadhaar-authentication, document-upload and payment-gateway modules of the GSTAT portal, in consultation with GSTN and the authority administering Bharatkosh; and
(d) pass such other order(s)/direction(s) as this Hon’ble Board may deem fit and proper in the facts and circumstances of the case.
The Association shall remain grateful for the consideration extended to this representation, made bona fide in the larger interest of the trade, industry and professional fraternity, and in furtherance of the object of access to justice that animates the Goods and Services Tax Appellate Tribunal itself.
Thanking you,
Yours faithfully,
For GSTAT Bar Association Delhi
(Naman Gupta)
Patron
Enel.:
1. Copy of the flyer and minutes of the proceedings of the inaugural launch programme of the GSTAT portal dated 15.06.2026 (Annexure A),
2. Representative screenshots evidencing the technical errors referred to in Grounds above (Annexure B),
3. Copy of screenshot of Authorised Representative error while adding as AR.
Author Bio
