Pre-GST Litigation: What is it?
Indirect tax litigation is a subset of pre-GST litigation. Pre-GST litigation refers to all litigation and matters that are still pending from the pre-GST system. This legal system covers cases involving excise, sales tax, VAT, and other taxes.
Why is it difficult to handle pre-GST litigation?
Managing pre-GST litigation is laborious for a number of reasons. Here are a few justifications:
1. Manual work/documentation: Even today, a significant amount of legal material is created and preserved manually. Managing significant paper-based documents from the time before GST is difficult because there are no digital copies.
2. Missing documents: It is difficult for both taxpayers and the government because some paperwork and documentation from the pre-GST era is not even available today.
3. Outdated information/ circulars: In the existing taxation system, it is difficult to locate and use outdated government notifications and circulars. In addition, tax laws have evolved significantly over time.
4. Authorities change: Over time, a number of authorities, tax officials, and court judges have resigned, moved, or otherwise changed. Due to the surge in current GST lawsuit cases, handling pre-GST litigation with new employees who may or may not be familiar with prior laws might further impede progress.
5. The GST and tax rules in effect now are entirely different: The Indian judicial system has undergone a major transformation as a result of the introduction of GST regulations and the one nation, one tax rule for enterprises. Different taxes have different regulations and procedures that must be followed.
6. Processing held up owing to open cases: India has thousands of open tax cases, and more are anticipated, despite the fact that there aren’t enough courts or personnel to handle them.
What’s the Process?
The assessee can use the procedure described below to consolidate numerous pending cases or lawsuits. Reviewing the Notice, SCN, and Order The business is required to examine and confirm the show cause notice (SCN) it got from the GST department.
Educating the business and going over the next steps: The next step is to quickly get the business ready, choose how to respond to the notification, and create a strategy to guarantee the business’s defense at all costs.
Gathering the necessary data, information, and reconciliations: You will need to gather and present the officials with a substantial amount of evidence, documents, data and relevant material in order to support your company’s claim.
Write a proper response or appeal after doing thorough study for a legal foundation: Once you have all the required details and supporting evidence, you must properly respond to the notification in writing.
Sending the Response/ Appellation : You must deliver your finished response or appeal to the department.
How can SRV Associates assist you?
Easily handle departmental audits by offering:
● Create a matrix of transactions by mapping all different sorts of suppliers to their associated taxes. This matrix would then serve as the company’s GST profile.
● Maintain a database of all tax positions as well as the ability to archive any judicial precedent or legal opinion that served as the basis for the tax position in question. Utilize LMS’s automatic updates for such tax positions to revalidate your tax positions at regular periods.
● Utilize a thorough checklist-driven data archival system with a one-touch retrieval mechanism to proactively gather and store the data and documents needed to handle a departmental audit.
● Track the progress of audits across GSTINs, Divisions and Legal Entities (as a group) by logging all pertinent information up until a lawsuit is filed using the audit tracking system.