Page 104 - GSTL_2nd July 2020 _Vol 38_Part 1

22 GST LAW TIMES [ Vol. 38
form is a genuine one which should not preclude him from having
its claim examined by the authorities in accordance with law. A di-
rection is accordingly issued to the Respondents to either open the
portal so as to enable the Petitioner to again file TRAN-1 electroni-
cally or to accept a manually filed TRAN-1 on or before 31st May,
2019. The Petitioner’s claims will thereafter be processed in accord-
ance with law.
12. With a view to ensure that in future such glitches can be over-
come, the Court directs the Respondents to consider providing in
the software itself a facility of the trader/dealer being able to save
onto his/her system the filled up form and also a facility for review-
ing the form that has been filled up before its submission. It should
also permit the dealer to print out the filled up form which will con-
tain the date/time of its submission online. The Respondents will al-
so consider whether there can be a message that pops up by way of
an acknowledgement that the Form with the credit claimed has been
correctly uploaded.”
11. Similar directions were issued by this Court in Kusum Enter-
prises Pvt. Ltd. (supra).
12. In the present case, the Court is satisfied that, although the
failure was on the part of the Petitioner to fill up the data concern-
ing its stock in Column 7(d) of Form TRAN- instead of Column 7(a),
the error was inadvertent. The Respondents ought to have provided
in the system itself a facility for rectification of such errors which
are clearly bona fide. It should be noted at this stage that although
the system provided for revision of a return, the deadline for mak-
ing the revision coincided with the last date for filing the return i.e.
27th December, 2017. Thus, such facility was rendered impractical
and meaningless.”
6. The factual position in the present case is not any different. Though, the
case of the petitioner cannot be strictly categorized as covered by “technical
glitches ”, however, as held in M/s. Blue Bird (supra), the GST System is still
in a ‘trial and error phase’ as far as its implementation is concerned and alt-
hough the failure was on the part of the Petitioner, the error was inadvert-
ent. The petitioner does not have any evidence or proof in support of his
submission that the personnel responsible for dealing with the compliances
was unable to file the requisite Form due to non-functioning of GST Portal.
However, we have noticed that in large number of matters, the petitioner
have similarly complained that before the deadline, they were not able to
access the GST Portal. This could be presumably because of low bandwidth,
given the fact that before the deadline, a large number of taxpayers all over
the country, were trying to submit the declaration in form TRAN-1. In these
circumstances, we would thus give the benefit of doubt to the petitioner.
7. At this juncture, it may be noted that as per Notification No. 49/2019,
dated 9-10-2019 issued by CBIC, the date prescribed for filing of Form GST
TRAN-1 under Rule 117(1A) of the CGST Rules has been extended to 31-12-
2019. This itself demonstrates that the Respondents recognise the fact that
the registered persons were not able to upload the Form GST TRAN-1 due
to the glitches in the system. It is not fair to expect that each person who
may not have been able to upload the Form GST TRAN-1 should have pre-

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