“E-Way Bill” in GST
Sections 122-138 CGST — Penalties, Prosecution, and Arrest Provisions
GST penalties. Complete guide under GST law. Updated March 2026.
Section 46 of CGST Act 2017 — Notice to Return Defaulters
Section 46 of the CGST Act empowers the proper officer to issue a notice in Form GSTR-3A to a registered person who fails to furnish a return, requiring the return to be filed within 15 days.
Sections 59-64 CGST — Assessment (Self, Provisional, Summary, Best Judgment)
GST assessment. Complete guide under GST law. Updated March 2026.
GST Penalty Guide — Every Fine, How to Avoid It
Every GST penalty, interest rate, and section reference for 2026–27. Late return filing, ITC fraud, non-registration, e-invoicing violations, and more — with exact section numbers.
Reconciling Book Turnover with GST Returns
The profit and loss account has one revenue figure. GST has one for every registration, and includes transactions the accounts eliminate entirely. The reconciliation is not arithmetic — it is a list of twelve structural reasons the two can never be equal.
Sections 67-72 CGST — Inspection, Search, Seizure, and Detention of Goods
GST search seizure. Complete guide under GST law. Updated March 2026.
Finalisation of Accounts with GST: The Audit Approach
The financial statements are signed in September. The GST annual return is filed in December. Everything found in December belongs in the accounts signed in September — and by then it is too late.
Schedule I Entry 2: Stock Transfers in the FMCG Supply Chain
An FMCG company with four State registrations is, for GST purposes, four separate taxable persons. Every carton that moves between them is a supply — invoiced, valued, taxed and e-way-billed — even though not a rupee changes hands and the goods never leave the company's ownership.
GSTR-9C Part I: Basic Details, and What Must Be Verified
Four fields, three of them auto-populated. It looks like the least interesting part of the form — until a legal name in the GST registration turns out not to match the certificate of incorporation, at which point the answer is an amendment under the Companies Act, not a note in the reconciliation.
GSTR-9C Table 5O: The Residual Adjustment Row
Table 5O absorbs everything the earlier rows do not name — and because eleven of those rows have been optional in most years, it absorbs those too. The Guide is emphatic about one thing: it must not be used to make Table 5R come out at nil.
GSTR-9C Table 5R and Table 6: Unreconciled Turnover
Table 5R is the whole point of Part II — the difference between the adjusted books turnover and the turnover declared in the annual return. It can go either way, and the form deals with only one of those ways.
GSTR-9 Part VI: Tables 15 to 19, Demands, Refunds and HSN
Part VI is where the optional tables live — except that Table 17 stopped being optional in FY 2021-22. And at the end of it sits a verification clause that asks the signatory to affirm something most people never read: that the benefit of any reduction in output tax has been passed on.
Warehouses, "Fulfilled by ECO" and the Additional Place of Business
The 'Fulfilled by ECO' model is a logistics decision that most sellers make for commercial reasons. It is also a registration event, and the consequences of missing it reach three separate places in the GST law at once.
Rule 86A: Blocking the Electronic Credit Ledger
An officer can freeze your credit on "reasons to believe" without a notice or a hearing. Five grounds, a one-year sunset, and a body of law on what the safeguards mean.
GSTR-9C Table 5D: Deemed Supply Under Schedule I
This is the one adjustment with no source document to start from. Deemed supplies do not appear in a revenue ledger, do not have a return line of their own, and often do not appear in the accounts at all. The Guide's instruction is blunt: look beyond the books.
Strict Construction, and the Burden of Proving an Exemption
There is an asymmetry at the heart of every exemption dispute, and it is settled law. A charging provision in doubt is read in the taxpayer's favour; an exemption in doubt is read in Revenue's. Knowing that changes how an exemption position should be built.
An Exempt Supply Inside a Composite or Mixed Supply
An exempt item behaves in exactly opposite ways depending on how it is bundled. In a composite supply it can exempt everything around it. In a mixed supply it gets taxed at the highest rate in the basket. The difference is worth more than any exemption entry.
Provisional Refund for Inverted Duty Structure: Section 54(6)
GST 2.0 collapsed the rate structure to 5% and 18%. A great many finished goods moved down to 5% while the chemicals, packaging, machinery services and job work behind them stayed at 18%. The arithmetic result is an inverted duty structure at a scale the refund machinery was not built for — and...
GST 2.0 Transition Checklist: The Twelve Things to Close Out
Masters, stock, contracts, credit ledgers, refund claims and disclosures. A practical close-out list for the 22 September 2025 rate change, still worth running today.
Section 145 of CGST Act 2017 — Admissibility of micro films, facsimile copies of documents and computer printouts as documents and as evidence
Section 145 makes microfilms, facsimile copies and computer printouts of records admissible as documents and as evidence in GST proceedings, subject to prescribed conditions on how the copies and printouts were produced.
Retrospective Exemption, and What It Does to Past Periods
A retrospective exemption sounds like unqualified good news. For a supplier who has already collected the tax, it is not — it can produce unjust enrichment, credit reversals with interest, refund claims by customers, and forfeiture of what nobody claims back.
Registration, Documents and E-Way Bills for Exempt Supplies
Making only exempt supplies removes the tax, not the paperwork. Registration can still be required, a document must still be issued, records must still be kept — and there is a ₹10,000 penalty for not keeping them even where no tax was ever payable.
TDS on Metal Scrap: Clause (d) and the Council History
In October 2024 GST TDS stopped being a government-sector subject. A new clause (d) brought ordinary businesses into section 51 — every registered person buying metal scrap from another registered person — and it arrived alongside a reverse charge that catches the other half of the trade.
Rule 45 and Rule 55: The Job Work Delivery Challan
The delivery challan is what allows goods worth crores to move without an invoice and without tax. It is also the only document tying those goods back to their owner — which is why the rules about who may issue it, who may endorse it, and when a fresh one is needed are unusually precise.