2019 – Posted in: Press Information Bureau

Goods and Services Tax Appellate Tribunal (GSTAT)

Recently the 35th GST Council meeting was held under the chairmanship of Union Finance & Corporate Affairs Minister.

Altogether, 12 Agenda items were discussed during the Council meeting, some of these items were of regular nature.
One of the major decisions taken by the council is in regard to the location of the State and the Area Benches for the Goods and Services Tax Appellate Tribunal (GSTAT) for various States and Union Territories with the legislature.
It has been decided to have a common State Bench for the States of Sikkim, Nagaland, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh.
The tenure of the National Anti-Profiteering Authority has been extended by 2 years.
The Council also decided to introduce an electronic invoicing system in a phase-wise manner for B2B transactions.
E-invoicing is a rapidly expanding technology that would help taxpayers in backward integration and automation of tax relevant processes.

The National Bench of the Appellate Tribunal shall be situated at New Delhi.
GSTAT shall be presided over by its President and shall consist of one Technical Member (Centre) and one Technical Member (State).
Goods and Services Tax Appellate Tribunal is the forum of the Second appeal in GST laws and the first common forum of dispute resolution between Centre and States.
Being a common forum, GST Appellate Tribunal will ensure that there is uniformity in redressal of disputes arising under GST, and therefore, in implementation of GST across the country.
Chapter XVIII of the CGST Act provides for an appeal and review mechanism for dispute resolution under the GST regime.
Section 109 of this chapter empowers the Centre to constitute, on the recommendation of the GST Council, an appellate tribunal for hearing appeals against the orders passed by the Appellate Authority.

The National Anti-profiteering Authority (NAA) is the institutional mechanism under GST law to check the unfair profit-making activities by the trading community.
The formation of NAA comes in the background of rate-reduction of large number of items by GST Council in its 22nd meeting at Guwahati. At the meeting, the Council reduced rates of more than 200 items including goods and services.

Its core function is to ensure that the benefits of the reduction is GST rates on goods and services made by GST Council and proportional change in the Input tax credit passed on to the ultimate consumers and recipient respectively by way of reduction in the prices by the suppliers.
Another function is to ensure that traders are not realizing unfair profit by charging high price from consumers in the name of GST. The responsibility of NAA is to examine and check such profiteering activities and recommend punitive actions including cancellation of Registration.

Source: PIB

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