Nine years after India rolled out its Goods and Services Tax (GST), one philosophy has proven more durable than anything in the architecture of the law: when a taxpayer misses a deadline, it is enforced to the day; when the state misses one, it is extended by notification.
GST has been Independent India’s largest fiscal experiment: one tax across all states, touching every citizen in a way that even the 1991 reforms did not. In the early years, extensions owing to ‘teething problems’ were a necessity, not an indulgence.
That is precisely why their persistence into the later years raises this question: is it a confession of structural unreadiness or an act of self-exemption by the state?
As a tax-return form, GSTR-3B was a stopgap while the invoice-matching architecture of GSTR-1/2/3 stabilized. GSTR-2 was suspended within months and GSTR-3 forms were not filed. The provisions for matching were deleted in 2022 and the rules amended retrospectively to institutionalize 3B, which is now GST’s foundational fiscal record.
Section 168A of the Central GST Act institutionalized the state’s leeway on a time limitation for dispute cases. Three notifications in 2022-23 extended the time span to pass adjudication orders for 2017-20, invoking covid as ‘force majeure’ long after those relaxations ended. One of them lacked even the GST Council’s prior recommendation, though the council ratified it later; high courts are now split on its validity and the Supreme Court is yet to settle the matter.
The GST compensation cess, originally meant to run from July 2017 to June 2022, was extended to March 2026—not to compensate states but repay the roughly ₹2.7 trillion borrowed by the Centre during the pandemic. This ‘transitional’ levy that outlived its purpose by four years and became a debt-servicing instrument has finally ended.
Reverse charges on purchases from unregistered persons were suspended within months and eventually redrafted in 2018 to apply only to notified classes, thus diluting what Parliament had enacted in July 2017. Provisions for tax deducted and collected at source (TDS and TCS), also enacted nine years ago, went live only in October 2018.
The GST Tribunal took eight years to constitute. The case limitation clock was held in suspension to cover the gap. Even this fix is an extension; with the Tribunal operational only from September 2025, a notification that month gave taxpayers until 30 June 2026 to file their entire backlog of appeals since 2017 (some 480,000 of them), a deadline that was then pushed to 31 July when its own internet portal buckled.
GSTR-9/9C, the annual return, was not ready to be filed annually: the first, for 2017-18, arrived in staggered batches in 2020, and 9C’s audit certification gave way to self-certification in 2021. A New Return System (RET-1, Sahaj, Sugam) was announced, piloted and abandoned. E-invoicing was deferred, then lowered through six turnover tranches from ₹500 crore (in 2020) to ₹5 crore (in 2023). Even the e-way bill’s “ship-to” field was pushed again to August 2026.
Yet the state’s rigidity where an extension would favour taxpayers is stark. Some extensions did spare taxpayers the price of a system that could not take their returns, but that only concedes it was not ready.
The input tax credit deadline was enforced to the day, generating demands running into tens of thousands of crores, until the law was amended retrospectively to extend it to 30 November 2021 for 2017-18 through 2020-21: an admission that the deadline was unrealistic.
The transitional-credit window (Tran-1/Tran-2), litigated across high courts, needed a 2022 Supreme Court order to re-open the portal for two months—five years after the ‘transition.’
The taxpayer’s side lacks basic discretionary elasticity. The appellate authority can condone a delay of one month; and the Tribunal, three months. Beyond that limit, no authority in the GST hierarchy can hear an appeal a single day late, whatever the cause.
We don’t need novelty to address that asymmetry. The state already trusts its own officers with discretion on direct taxes. Under the income-tax law, the appellate authority and Tribunal may condone a delay of any length for “sufficient cause,” and a tax commissioner may waive a penalty for genuine hardship. That discretion is bounded; negligence is still refused relief, but genuine cases get a fair hearing.
Six decades of this have not brought tax administration to its knees. It is GST that treats its adjudicators as unfit to weigh a taxpayer’s cause—its tribunal is stricter than the excise and customs tribunal, which too could forgive a delay of any length for good reason.
Today’s question, then—for Parliament, the government and writ courts—is whether a law that has survived on the power of deadline extension can deny every discretionary extension to those it governs. A statute that lived by extension should not preach a hard limit. The durable answer lies in the law: give GST’s appellate forums the same latitude that direct taxation allows.
India’s GST regime must show restraint. Or we risk small businesses getting engulfed, even failing. A shop-owner who recovers from a bereavement or hospitalization must not get trapped by an order six months old; income-tax law would give the same taxpayer a hearing but GST will not. Grace is not a concession, but an act of proportionate maturity—and it’s not a novelty either.
The authors are former officers, Indian Revenue Service.