Every business that rings us about a GST appeal asks the same first question, and it is the wrong one. They ask how long they have. A first appeal under section 107 is a money gate, not a date gate. The dates matter, and they are short. But the dates are not what stops most appeals from being filed. Read the opening words of section 107(6): no appeal shall be filed under sub-section (1) unless the appellant has paid. Not that a late payment attracts interest, and not that the appeal is weaker without it. Unless. An appeal presented without the deposit has not been validly filed at all. What has to be paid comes in two clauses. Clause (a) is the admitted part of the tax, interest, fine, fee and penalty, in full. Clause (b) is ten per cent of the remaining amount of tax in dispute, subject to a maximum of twenty-five crore rupees. Note the base of that ten per cent. It is the disputed tax. Interest, penalty, fine and fee are not in it, and in a GST demand those heads are frequently larger than the tax itself. Then comes the sub-section almost nobody quotes, and it changes the whole arithmetic. Section 107(7): where the appellant has paid the amount under sub-section (6), the recovery proceedings for the balance amount shall be deemed to be stayed. Deemed. No application, no hearing, no discretion to refuse. The deposit produces the stay by operation of the statute. One more provision decides how much care the first appeal deserves. Section 107(11) bars the Appellate Authority from referring the case back to the adjudicating authority. There is no remand. Whatever document you did not file and whatever fact you did not plead is not waiting for a second round below, which makes the first appeal the last place your record can be built. Where we stop: we are not your chartered accountant and not your counsel. We do not certify computations, we give no view on the merits of a demand, and we put no number on your chances. The only figures we hand you are the ones the statute fixes.
What is on this page
A first appeal under the GST law is an application to a different officer, in a different office, asking that a decision or order already passed against you be confirmed, modified or annulled. It is not a request for reconsideration by the officer who passed it, and it is not a representation.
Section 107(1) of the Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 gives the right in broad terms: any person aggrieved by any decision or order passed under the Act may appeal to such Appellate Authority as may be prescribed. Any decision or order, not only a demand. A rejection of a refund, a cancellation of registration, an order on classification, a penalty order — all of them come within the same words.
The appeal that most readers of this page have in mind is against a demand order, and that is what the arithmetic below is built on. The dates and the deposit, though, come from the same section whatever the order was about.
Almost every first call about this starts with the same question: how long do we have?
It is a reasonable question and it has a short answer. Three months from the date on which the decision or order was communicated to you, with one further month available on a stated ground. Four months, at the outside, and not a day beyond it under this section.
Then the conversation usually moves to drafting, and that is where it goes wrong, because the dates were never the thing most likely to stop the appeal.
Here is the proposition this page exists to make, and it is worth stating before any of the detail.
A business that misses the limitation has a serious problem, and it happens. A business that reaches the limitation with the paperwork ready and no money arranged has the same problem, arrives at it by a different route, and almost never saw it coming. The second case is far more common than the first.
Read the opening words of section 107(6): no appeal shall be filed under sub-section (1) unless the appellant has paid. Unless. Not that a shortfall attracts interest, not that the appeal is weaker. The payment is a condition of filing.
Two amounts, under two clauses, and they do completely different jobs.
Clause (a) requires payment, in full, of such part of the amount of tax, interest, fine, fee and penalty arising from the impugned order as is admitted by you. Clause (b) requires a sum equal to ten per cent of the remaining amount of tax in dispute arising from that order, subject to a maximum of twenty-five crore rupees.
CGST Act, 2017, section 107(6) — no appeal shall be filed under sub-section (1) unless the appellant has paid (a) in full, such part of the amount of tax, interest, fine, fee and penalty arising from the impugned order as is admitted by him; and (b) a sum equal to ten per cent of the remaining amount of tax in dispute arising from the said order, subject to a maximum of twenty-five crore rupees.
Clause (a) is the price of conceding part of the order. Clause (b) is the price of disputing the rest. Most of the confusion on this subject comes from treating them as one number.
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The consequence of that drafting is harder-edged than most people expect.
An appeal presented without the amounts under sub-section (6) has not been validly filed. It is not a late appeal, not a defective appeal that can be cured at leisure, and not an appeal that proceeds while the money is arranged. The condition sits in front of the filing.
Which means a business planning an appeal has to plan the cash at the same time as the drafting, and has to know the real figure early enough to arrange it. A reader who learns the deposit figure in the last week of the fourth month has learned it too late to do anything about it.
Everything so far is the half of section 107 that gets written about. The next sub-section is the half that changes how the money should be thought about, and we have never seen it quoted in a commercial explanation of GST appeals.
Where the appellant has paid the amount under sub-section (6), the recovery proceedings for the balance amount shall be deemed to be stayed.
CGST Act, 2017, section 107(7) — where the appellant has paid the amount under sub-section (6), the recovery proceedings for the balance amount shall be deemed to be stayed.
Three features of that sentence deserve attention. The stay is deemed, so it arises by operation of the statute rather than by anybody granting it. There is no application to make, no hearing, and no discretion to refuse. And it attaches to the balance amount, which is the part you have not paid.
Put sub-sections (6) and (7) side by side and the character of the payment changes entirely.
Read on its own, the deposit looks like a toll: money handed over for permission to be heard. Read with sub-section (7), it is the consideration for a statutory stay on the recovery of everything else. The same payment, understood two ways, and only the second one is accurate.
For a business with recovery breathing down its neck, no other sentence here does as much work. Paying ten per cent of the disputed tax stops recovery of the balance at once, with nobody having to exercise a discretion in your favour.
One caution so nothing is overstated. The stay covers recovery of the balance. The amounts you deposit have been collected and are not stayed, and anything already attached before you file is a separate situation needing immediate advice.
A business weighing an appeal usually sets the deposit against the chance of winning. That is the wrong comparison, or at least an incomplete one.
The deposit also buys time and protection: recovery of the balance stops, the bank conversation changes, and the dispute moves from a collection problem to a legal one. Those are worth something independently of the eventual outcome, and they are worth a great deal to a business whose working capital is the thing at risk.
So the question is not only whether you will win. It is also what the alternative costs you while you decide. A business that pays nothing and files nothing has not saved the deposit; it has exchanged the deposit for recovery of the whole amount.
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One question organises this whole subject, and it is not about the merits.
What is the tax component of this order, and what is ten per cent of it? Everything follows from that. It tells you the real cost of filing, it tells you the price of the stay, and it very often tells you that the appeal is far cheaper than the business assumed, because the figure people carry in their heads is ten per cent of the total on the order.
Answer that question before you decide anything, including whether to engage anybody.
Now the dates, properly, because they are short and because one of them is widely misread.
Section 107(1) allows the appeal to be filed within three months from the date on which the decision or order is communicated to the person. Three calendar months, from communication.
CGST Act, 2017, section 107(1) — any person aggrieved by any decision or order passed under this Act may appeal to such Appellate Authority as may be prescribed within three months from the date on which the said decision or order is communicated to such person.
From communication to you. Not from the date printed on the order, not from the date the officer signed it, and not from the date you happened to notice it.
In practice that is a question of fact with real consequences, and it is worth establishing from the record at the very start rather than assuming. Where an order was uploaded on one date and actually reached you on another, the difference may be the whole of your position, and it is the kind of question that has been argued a great deal.
Fix that date in writing before anything else happens, and keep whatever proves it. Every other date on this page is measured from it, and a dispute about it is an advocate matter rather than a drafting one.
There is one extension, and it is narrow.
Where the Appellate Authority is satisfied that the appellant was prevented by sufficient cause from presenting the appeal within the period of three months or six months, it may allow it to be presented within a further period of one month.
CGST Act, 2017, section 107(4) — the Appellate Authority may, if satisfied that the appellant was prevented by sufficient cause from presenting the appeal within the aforesaid period of three months or six months, allow it to be presented within a further period of one month.
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The further month is not an entitlement and it is not obtained by asking.
The sub-section requires the Appellate Authority to be satisfied that the appellant was prevented by sufficient cause. That is a condition about the reason for the delay, and it has to be established rather than asserted. A business that simply filed in the fourth month without explaining anything has not engaged with the sub-section at all.
So if you are going to be late, assemble the reason while it is still fresh, with whatever documents support it, and plead it. A reason recalled four months later reads very differently from one recorded at the time.
Under this section, nothing. Three months plus one is the whole of what section 107 provides, and the Appellate Authority has no power under it to go further.
That is a hard sentence and it needs to be said plainly, because the commonest way a business loses a good case on this subject is by discovering the limitation after it has run. Whether anything else is available on particular facts is a question for an advocate, and it is dealt with near the end of this page.
There is a second route into the same Appellate Authority, and it belongs to the department rather than to you.
Section 107(2) allows the Commissioner, on his own motion or on a request from the Commissioner of State tax or Union territory tax, to call for and examine the record of any proceedings and to direct a subordinate officer to apply to the Appellate Authority within six months of communication of the decision or order. Section 107(3) then provides that such an application is dealt with as if it were an appeal against that decision or order.
CGST Act, 2017, sections 107(2) and 107(3) — the Commissioner may call for and examine the record and direct a subordinate officer to apply to the Appellate Authority within six months of communication; such an application is then dealt with as if it were an appeal against the decision or order.
Two practical consequences, and the first surprises people.
An order in your favour is not final the moment it is passed. The department has six months to take it to the Appellate Authority by this route, which is twice your own period. A business that treats a favourable order as the end of the matter and destroys its working papers has made a mistake it will discover at month five.
Keep the file alive for at least six months after any order in your favour. That is the reason for the record-keeping section later on this page, and the reason a legal file management arrangement is worth having for tax matters specifically.
The second consequence is simply that the number six in this section is not yours. It appears in section 107(4) alongside the three months only because that sub-section covers both routes.
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Four dates, on one sheet of paper, the day an order arrives.
| Date | Where it comes from | What it governs |
|---|---|---|
| Communication of the order | Established from the record | Everything below runs from it |
| Three months later | Section 107(1) | Your appeal as of right |
| One month after that | Section 107(4) | Only on sufficient cause, established |
| Six months after communication | Section 107(2) | The department own route, if the order favoured you |
Put that sheet at the front of the file. It is the single cheapest piece of work on this subject and it prevents the most expensive mistake.
Back to the money, and to the clause people skip.
Clause (a) requires payment in full of the part of the demand you admit. Note the breadth: tax, interest, fine, fee and penalty, all five heads, to the extent admitted. Whatever part of the order you are not disputing has to be paid, and paid fully, not at ten per cent.
Where a business disputes the entire order, clause (a) is nil. Where it accepts part, that part is payable in full before the appeal is filed, and omitting it is one of the two commonest ways an appeal becomes defective.
Clause (b) is the ten per cent, and its base is narrower than almost anybody assumes.
A sum equal to ten per cent of the remaining amount of tax in dispute arising from the said order. Remaining, meaning after the admitted part is taken out. Tax, meaning the tax head and not the order total.
Clause (b) does not say ten per cent of the demand. It says ten per cent of the remaining amount of tax in dispute. That one word is worth more to most readers than everything else on this page put together.
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Clause (b) ends with a ceiling: subject to a maximum of twenty-five crore rupees.
For almost every business reading this the cap will never be reached, and it is relevant only in very large demands. It is set out here for completeness and because this page prints a figure only where it has read it in the provision itself, and this one is in clause (b).
There is a deliberate contrast later on. For the Tribunal stage this page prints no cap at all, and the section on withheld figures explains why.
Five heads appear in clause (a) and one of them appears in clause (b). Setting them out side by side is the quickest way to see the structure.
| Head in the order | If you admit it | If you dispute it |
|---|---|---|
| Tax | Payable in full, clause (a) | Ten per cent, clause (b) |
| Interest | Payable in full, clause (a) | Nothing payable to file |
| Fine | Payable in full, clause (a) | Nothing payable to file |
| Fee | Payable in full, clause (a) | Nothing payable to file |
| Penalty | Payable in full, clause (a) | Nothing payable to file |
Read the right-hand column down. Only the tax row carries a deposit. That is the whole arithmetic of a GST first appeal in one column.
Work an example, because the numbers make the point better than the wording does.
Take an order for one crore and fourteen lakh, broken down in the order itself as thirty-eight lakh of tax, fifty-one lakh of interest and twenty-five lakh of penalty, with the whole of it disputed. Ten per cent of the order total would be eleven lakh and forty thousand. Ten per cent of the disputed tax is three lakh and eighty thousand.
Same order, same statute, two figures, and the difference is seven lakh sixty thousand. Businesses abandon appeals over that difference, which is the reason this page recomputes the figure for every caller before anything else is discussed.
Stated plainly, so there is no doubt: interest is not in the base, penalty is not in the base, fine is not in the base, and fee is not in the base. Clause (b) attaches to the remaining amount of tax in dispute.
This is not a concession or an interpretation. It is what the clause says, and it is why the order own breakdown matters so much. An order that states a single consolidated figure with no head-wise split needs that split worked out before the deposit can be computed at all, and working that split out is your accountant task on the order, not a legal question.
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A reader whose order carries no tax at all is in a different position, and it needs stating carefully.
Where an order imposes only a penalty, there is no disputed tax for clause (b) to attach to on its own terms. The treatment of appeals against penalty-only orders has been the subject of amendment and of litigation about whether changes apply prospectively, and the position is not one we are prepared to state as settled on a page somebody pays money from.
If your order is penalty only, treat the deposit question as open and get it confirmed for your own order before you pay. A short online legal consultation or a video consultation settles it against the position current on the day you file, which is the only position that matters.
The mechanics sit in the rules and the portal rather than in section 107, and they change, so this page describes the shape rather than the keystrokes.
The deposit is paid through the portal against the demand, and the appeal is filed with the challan evidencing it. What matters for the file is that the payment is traceable to this order and to these two clauses, and that the computation behind it is on paper.
The question of which ledger a deposit may be paid from has itself been litigated, and that is one more reason the computation and the payment should be done with your accountant rather than improvised at the deadline.
Our own sequence, for completeness, since the rest of this page assumes it.
Communication date from the record. The three-month and one-month dates written down. The order split into its five heads. Clause (a) computed on the admitted part. Clause (b) computed on the remaining disputed tax. Then, and only then, a conversation about drafting and about what we charge.
An order of this kind rarely arrives alone, and the rest of the file usually needs attention at the same time. The notice that preceded it is dealt with on GST show cause notice reply and the lighter version on GST notice reply; where the dispute has also put the registration in question, see GST cancellation, GST registration and the periodic GST return work that the department will look at alongside it. Where part of the demand turns on a refund already granted, GST refund is the related route, and the underlying records usually need bookkeeping brought up to date before any computation can be trusted. Where somebody other than the proprietor or a director will sign and file, that authority has to exist on paper — a power of attorney or, in a firm or an LLP, the authority in the partnership deed or the LLP agreement.
That computation goes to you in writing before any engagement, and it is free. It sometimes ends the conversation because the figure turns out to be small enough that the business files on its own. That outcome is fine by us and it is better than the one where somebody pays ten per cent of the wrong number.
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The money half of this subject is finished. The second half is about what the first appeal can actually deliver, and one sub-section settles it.
Section 107(11) requires the Appellate Authority, after making such further inquiry as may be necessary, to pass such order as it thinks just and proper, confirming, modifying or annulling the decision or order appealed against, but not to refer the case back to the adjudicating authority that passed it.
CGST Act, 2017, section 107(11) — the Appellate Authority shall, after making such further inquiry as may be necessary, pass such order as it thinks just and proper, confirming, modifying or annulling the decision or order appealed against, but shall not refer the case back to the adjudicating authority that passed the said decision or order.
That last clause is the operative one and it is absolute on its face. There is no remand.
The Appellate Authority decides the matter itself. It may confirm the order, it may modify it, it may annul it, and it may make further inquiry on the way. What it may not do is hand the file back to the officer who passed the order so that the exercise can be done again with better material.
Readers who have dealt with other appellate forums should pause on that, because a remand is the ordinary relief in many of them, and the assumption that the matter will simply go back for fresh verification is extremely common in GST practice.
It is good news and bad news in the same sentence.
The good news is finality. The matter does not disappear back into the office that created the problem, there is no second round of the same adjudication, and the appellate order decides something.
The bad news is that the record closes with you. If the material needed to win was not filed at the first appeal, there is no stage at which the officer below is told to look at it again.
So the first appeal is not a procedural step on the way to the real argument. It is the real argument, and it is the last point at which the file is yours to build.
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Everything about how an appeal should be prepared follows from that.
Every invoice, every proof of payment, every reconciliation, every piece of correspondence, every supplier detail as it stood on the relevant date: it goes in now, with the appeal, indexed. Not held back, not summarised with an offer to produce on request, and not reserved for a later stage.
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Four practical consequences, and they are the difference between an appeal that can be decided in your favour and one that cannot.
Index and paginate, so that a ground can be read against its proof. Tie each ground to the pages that support it, in a covering note. Include the documents that are inconvenient as well as the ones that help, because an authority that finds a gap later discounts the whole bundle. And where a document cannot be produced in original, say so and explain why rather than leaving a silence.
Where originals are genuinely at risk, a certified true copy of anything irreplaceable is worth taking before the bundle leaves your office, and a document verification pass over the set catches the mismatches that cause the most damage when an officer finds them first.
An indexed bundle is not presentation, it is substance, because of the sub-section above. The authority cannot send the matter back for the material to be assembled properly, so the assembly is part of the case rather than a courtesy to the reader.
Section 107(11) carries two provisos, and both protect the appellant against being made worse off without warning.
The first provides that an order enhancing any fee, penalty or fine, or confiscating goods of greater value, or reducing the amount of a refund or input tax credit, shall not be passed unless the appellant has been given a reasonable opportunity of showing cause against the proposed order.
The second does the same job for a fresh liability rather than an enhancement. Where an appellate order would require you to pay tax that was never paid or was paid short, or to give back a refund that should not have gone out, or to reverse credit that should not have been taken, two things are required first: a notice to show cause, and that the order come within the limitation sections 73 and 74 would have imposed on the officer below.
Section 107(11), provisos — first, nothing may be enhanced and no refund or credit reduced without a reasonable opportunity of showing cause. Second, no fresh liability of the kind sections 73 and 74 govern without a show cause notice, and only within the limitation those sections would have set. The full wording of both, and of section 73 and section 74 themselves, sits on our GST show cause notice reply page, which is where that machinery properly belongs.
Those two provisos are worth knowing before they are needed, for two reasons.
The first is reassurance. An appeal does not expose you to a silent worsening of the order. If the Appellate Authority is minded to enhance, the statute requires that you be told and given a reasonable opportunity to answer.
The second is that a breach of either proviso is itself a ground. An enhancement arrived at without the opportunity the first proviso requires, or a fresh demand created outside the limitation the second proviso imports, is not merely unfair; it is contrary to the sub-section. Noticing that is an advocate matter, and noticing it quickly matters.
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On timing, the statute says something, and what it says is more modest than it is usually reported to be.
Section 107(13) requires the Appellate Authority, where it is possible to do so, to hear and decide every appeal within a period of one year from the date on which it is filed, excluding any period during which the issuance of the order was stayed by a court or Tribunal.
CGST Act, 2017, section 107(13) — the Appellate Authority shall, where it is possible to do so, hear and decide every appeal within a period of one year from the date on which it is filed; any period during which the issuance of the order was stayed by an order of a court or Tribunal is excluded.
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Six words carry that sub-section, and they are the six that get dropped when it is quoted.
A direction qualified by where it is possible to do so is not a deadline with a consequence attached. No right accrues to an appellant because a year has passed, and the sub-section provides for nothing to happen if it does.
Anybody who tells you your appeal will be decided within a year because the Act says so has quoted half a sentence. We will not give you a timeline on this, and the section on what we never estimate explains why in our own terms.
If the first appeal fails, the next forum is the Appellate Tribunal, and from here on this page becomes deliberately more careful than it has been so far.
The reason is not that the Tribunal stage is less important. It is that the position around it has been moving quickly, and the published accounts of it disagree with each other on points that involve money.
An appeal against the order of the Appellate Authority lies to the Appellate Tribunal under section 112. In outline, and this much is stable: the section carries its own limitation period, its own further deposit in addition to what was paid at the first appeal, and its own condonation power.
The structure therefore mirrors section 107 — a date, a deposit, and a narrow extension — but the figures and the dates are its own, and they are not the ones set out earlier on this page.
The Tribunal is functioning, and the framework around it has been built out over the last couple of years.
It has a President. Procedure rules have been notified. An electronic filing portal of its own has been opened, and filing through it has been made the normal route rather than an alternative to filing on paper.
That is a genuine change in how these appeals are handled, and it is the reason a reader following an older account may be preparing for a process that no longer operates that way. Confirm the filing method before preparing anything for the Tribunal.
One feature of the transition needs describing because it has caught a great many appellants.
Because the Tribunal became functional long after orders had begun to accumulate, a date was notified by which appeals against orders communicated before a stated cut-off had to be filed, in place of the ordinary period running from each order. Appellants holding older appellate orders were therefore working to a single common deadline rather than to their own three months.
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This page does not print that date, and the reason is worth setting out because it applies to every page you will read on the subject.
A notified filing window has a beginning and an end. Printed on a page, it reads as current for as long as the page exists, which may be years after it closed. A reader who finds such a date and relies on it is in a worse position than a reader who finds nothing, because they will stop looking.
If you are holding an appellate order and planning a Tribunal appeal, treat every date you find published anywhere, including on this page, as something to verify rather than something to rely on. Windows of this kind have opened and closed during the Tribunal transition, and the only authoritative position is the current one for your own order.
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Section 112(6) gives the Tribunal a power to condone delay on sufficient cause, for a further limited period, in the same way section 107(4) does at the first stage.
Two things follow. A late Tribunal appeal is not automatically hopeless, because the power exists. And the power is narrow and conditional, so it is not a substitute for filing in time, and invoking it is an exercise in establishing a reason rather than requesting an indulgence.
Whether it is available to you, and for how long, depends on dates we are not going to print. That is a question to put to counsel with the order in front of them.
Three refusals about the Tribunal stage specifically, stated so that nobody has to guess.
We will not quote you the Tribunal deposit as a figure, because the sources we checked for its cap contradicted each other. We will not tell you that a particular filing window is open or closed for your order, because that depends on dates and on your own order and because a wrong answer costs you the appeal. And we will not represent anybody before the Tribunal, which is not documentation work.
Our side of the bargain is the first-appeal position, read provision by provision, with a plain statement of the point at which our knowledge runs out. Every commercial page on this subject prints confident figures for both stages. We have printed them for one.
So the instruction for anybody contemplating a second appeal is short, and it is the last thing this half of the page has to say.
Take your appellate order to the Tribunal own portal and its own notifications, establish the period and the deposit as they stand on the day you intend to file, and get that confirmed by somebody who will be acting for you. Then compare it with whatever you have read, here or elsewhere, and work from the former.
That is not us declining to be useful. It is the only safe instruction on a part of the law that has moved three times in two years, and the rest of this page is what we can tell you with confidence instead.
Two neighbouring routes are worth naming so they are not confused with this one. A demand under the income-tax side is a different statute and a different forum altogether: see income tax appeal before the CIT(A). A State levy such as professional tax has its own machinery again. And where an assurance or affidavit is required in support of a late filing, those are drafted as such — an undertaking or a sworn statement through online affidavit drafting — rather than written into the grounds of appeal.
From here on the page is about our own work, and about the several places where it stops.
Three kinds of caller. A business that has just received a demand order and has not yet worked out what filing an appeal will cost it. A business whose four months have nearly run and who needs the arithmetic today rather than next week. And a business sitting on an order from two or three years ago, which is the hardest conversation on this page and the one dealt with near the end.
Nothing gets drafted in the first hour. What happens instead is four pieces of arithmetic and one reading.
The date the order was communicated to you, established from the record rather than from memory. The outer date under section 107(1) and the further month under 107(4), both written down. The split of the demand into tax, interest, fine, fee and penalty, because only one of those five feeds the ten per cent. The admitted portion, if any, which is payable in full. And a reading of the order itself to see what it actually decided.
Those five things decide whether there is an appeal worth filing and what it will cost to file it. A quotation given before they are known is a quotation for an unknown piece of work.
Set out as documents, because an appeal under this section is an evidentiary exercise rather than a form-filling one.
The grounds of appeal, drafted against what the order actually held. The statement of facts. The impugned order with its communication proof. The complete set of documents you are relying on, indexed and paginated. The computation showing the admitted amount and the ten per cent separately. The challan evidencing the deposit. And a short covering note identifying which ground is answered by which document.
The last item sounds like polish and is not. An appellate authority reading an indexed bundle in which each ground points to a page can decide the appeal. One reading a folder of loose annexures decides something else.
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We draft the grounds, the statement of facts, the computation and the index. We do not invent a ground, and we do not plead a fact you have not given us a document for.
The distinction matters more in an appeal than in ordinary drafting, because of section 107(11). The first appeal is where the record is made. A ground pleaded without material behind it does not merely fail; it occupies the one place where the material could have gone.
So our drafting question is always the same: which document proves this sentence? Where the answer is none, the sentence comes out and we tell you what would have to exist for it to go back in.
A boundary that readers are entitled to have drawn before they engage anybody for this work.
We are not your chartered accountant and we are not your counsel. We do not certify a computation, we do not give an opinion on the classification, valuation or rate questions underneath your demand, and none comes from us on whether a position will hold up on the merits. Those are professional judgments belonging to people qualified to make them.
What we do is the documentation of the appeal: the dates, the deposit arithmetic against the statutory formula, the grounds drafted from material you supply, and the bundle assembled so it can be read.
Three things we will not put a number or a probability on, however directly we are asked.
Whether your appeal will succeed. How long the Appellate Authority will take, notwithstanding the one-year direction in section 107(13). And what the Tribunal would do if the matter went further. Anybody offering you those three numbers is offering you an invented comfort, and in a matter where you have already deposited real money that is worse than no answer.
The only numbers we will give you are the ones the statute fixes: your dates, your admitted amount and your ten per cent. Those we will compute carefully and put in writing. The rest is not ours to sell.
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One habit of ours has saved readers more money than any drafting.
Before anything is paid, we recompute the demand as the order itself breaks it down, and we check what proportion of it is actually tax. Interest and penalty in a GST demand can exceed the tax component, and the ten per cent attaches to the disputed tax and not to the whole figure on the order. A business that has mentally budgeted ten per cent of the total is frequently budgeting several times what the statute asks for.
That recomputation is free and it goes to you in writing before any engagement. It occasionally ends the conversation, because the appeal turns out to be cheaper to file than the client assumed, and they file it themselves. We would rather that than the alternative.
Several situations on this subject stopped being documentation before they arrived.
A writ petition, which is sometimes the only route where a limitation has expired. Any challenge to the vires of a provision or a notification. A matter already before a High Court or the Tribunal. A prosecution or arrest under the GST provisions. A dispute about whether the order was ever validly communicated to you, which is a question of fact and law together. And any appeal where the merits turn on an interpretation that will have to be argued rather than documented.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it.
The communication question deserves naming twice, because it is the hinge on which a late appeal often turns and because it needs an advocate from the first day rather than after a rejection.
Whatever happens to the appeal, one bundle should survive it, in date order and in one place.
The order appealed against, with proof of when and how it reached you. The appeal as filed, with its acknowledgement. The deposit challans. Every document relied on. Any further submissions. The appellate order when it comes. And a one-page chronology at the front.
That chronology is the thing you will actually use. If the matter goes to the Tribunal, the dates in it drive the next limitation; if it does not, it is the record of a closed dispute that somebody will ask about during a due diligence three years from now.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
The figure, and then a clear statement of the much larger figure it sits beside.
Our fee is ₹11,999, with 30 – 90 days shown against it. Inside it: both limitation dates established, both clauses of the deposit computed, the grounds and statement of facts drafted, the bundle indexed and paginated, and the appeal filed.
Read that beside the deposit. On a disputed tax of fifty lakh rupees the statutory ten per cent is five lakh, and our charge is a small fraction of it. The money in an appeal is overwhelmingly the deposit, and the deposit is not ours.
The pre-deposit itself, which you pay to the government and not to us. The admitted amount, likewise. Your chartered accountant fees for any computation or certification. An advocate fee, where the matter turns into one of the situations listed two sections above. Tribunal fees and the further deposit if a second appeal is filed. And nothing is marked up by us anywhere in that list.
Where a quotation for appeal work is a single all-inclusive figure, ask which part of it is the statutory deposit. The deposit cannot be negotiated, discounted or bundled, because it is paid under section 107(6) and goes to the exchequer.
Two omissions, and they are different in kind from each other.
No figure appears anywhere above for what the Tribunal stage costs in deposit terms. The reason is that the sources we checked for the cap under the Tribunal provision contradicted each other, and a cap figure printed wrongly on a page like this would be read as settled by somebody about to pay it. The first-appeal cap in section 107(6)(b) we have printed, because we read it in the provision itself.
No probability, timeline or outcome appears either, for the reason in the section on what we never estimate.
Every commercial page on GST appeals prints a confident figure for both stages. We have printed one of the two, and said which one we read ourselves. That difference is the whole of what a reader can rely on.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
The hardest conversation on this subject, and the one we have most often.
Where an order is years old, the first appeal window under section 107 closed long ago and the further month with it. The honest position is that there is no appeal to file under that section, and nothing a drafting office does changes it. What remains is a question of whether any other route exists on your particular facts, and that is an advocate question rather than ours.
We will not take money to file an appeal that is plainly out of time without telling you plainly that it is out of time. If you want it filed anyway, on advice, we will say so in writing first and you will have that letter.
The one thing worth establishing even then is the date of communication, because an order that never validly reached you is not in the same position as one you received and sat on. That question is worth an hour of an advocate time before anybody concludes the matter is closed.
This happens more than it should, in two directions.
Some appellants pay ten per cent of the entire demand, including interest and penalty, when the provision attaches it to the disputed tax. Others pay the ten per cent and omit the admitted portion, which clause (a) requires in full, and the appeal is then defective for a reason nobody explained to them.
Either way the first step is the same: recompute against the order breakdown and establish what the provision actually required. Where too much has gone in, that is a refund question for your chartered accountant. Where too little has, the gap needs closing before the authority raises it.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
One date and one number are worth getting today, whatever else waits.
The date the order was communicated to you, from the record rather than from recollection. And the disputed tax figure, taken from the order own breakdown rather than from its total. With those two in hand you know your outer date, you know your deposit, and you know whether this is a matter of weeks or a matter for an advocate.
Both take one afternoon and neither costs anything. Nearly every bad outcome on this subject comes from a business that knew the total on the order and did not know either of these two things.
One proposition to carry away from the whole of this.
The deposit under section 107(6) is not a filing cost. It is the price of the stay that section 107(7) gives you on everything else, and it buys the one hearing at which your record can still be built, because section 107(11) forbids the case being sent back. Treat it as the most valuable money in the dispute rather than the most annoying.
Where the order under challenge is a refusal of registration rather than a demand, the papers behind it were made months earlier, in a reply to a query that had seven working days on it. How that stage works, and what the officer timetable is, is on our GST registration page.
Send us the order and the proof of when it reached you. Before any engagement we will put in writing your outer date under section 107(1), the further month under 107(4), the admitted amount under clause (a) and the ten per cent under clause (b) computed on the disputed tax alone.
Section 107 was read sub-section by sub-section for this page, and the figures below come from the provision rather than from commentary. The statute is the Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017. Section 107(1): any person aggrieved by any decision or order passed under the Act may appeal to such Appellate Authority as may be prescribed within three months from the date on which the said decision or order is communicated to such person. Section 107(2) allows the Commissioner, on his own motion or on a request from the Commissioner of State tax or Union territory tax, to call for and examine the record and direct a subordinate officer to apply to the Appellate Authority within six months of communication; section 107(3) provides that such an application is dealt with as if it were an appeal against the decision or order. Section 107(4): where the Appellate Authority is satisfied that the appellant was prevented by sufficient cause from presenting the appeal within the period of three months or six months, it may allow it to be presented within a further period of one month. Section 107(5) leaves the form and verification to the rules.
On the money, which is the subject of this page, section 107(6) provides that no appeal shall be filed under sub-section (1) unless the appellant has paid (a) in full, such part of the amount of tax, interest, fine, fee and penalty arising from the impugned order as is admitted by him, and (b) a sum equal to ten per cent of the remaining amount of tax in dispute arising from the said order, subject to a maximum of twenty-five crore rupees, in relation to which the appeal has been filed. Section 107(7) then provides that where the appellant has paid the amount under sub-section (6), the recovery proceedings for the balance amount shall be deemed to be stayed. Those two sub-sections read together are the proposition this page is built on: the deposit is the statutory price of a stay rather than a fee for filing.
On what the first appeal can and cannot do, section 107(11) requires the Appellate Authority, after such further inquiry as may be necessary, to pass such order as it thinks just and proper, confirming, modifying or annulling the decision or order appealed against, but not to refer the case back to the adjudicating authority that passed it. Its first proviso requires that an order enhancing a fee, penalty or fine, confiscating goods of greater value, or reducing a refund or input tax credit, be passed only after the appellant has had a reasonable opportunity of showing cause against it; its second proviso bars an appellate order from creating a fresh liability of the kind sections 73 and 74 govern unless the appellant has had a notice to show cause, and unless the order comes within the limitation those sections would have set. Section 107(13) directs the Appellate Authority to hear and decide every appeal where it is possible to do so within one year of filing, excluding any period during which the issuance of the order was stayed by a court or Tribunal.
Where this page stops being confident, it says so. The appeal to the Appellate Tribunal is governed by section 112, and the position around the Tribunal has moved a great deal recently: the Tribunal has a President, procedure rules have been notified, electronic filing through the Tribunal own portal has been made the normal route, and a notified date was fixed by which appeals against earlier orders had to be filed, with the Tribunal retaining a limited power under section 112(6) to condone delay on sufficient cause. We have described that framework rather than printed its dates and deposit cap as settled, for two reasons: the sources we checked disagreed with each other on the cap, and a notified filing date on a page like this is read as current long after it has passed. The instruction we give instead is to confirm the present position for your own order against the Tribunal own portal and notifications before relying on any date, including any date on this page. We print the first-appeal cap because we read it in section 107(6)(b) itself.
What this page deliberately leaves out. No view on the merits of any demand, no opinion on classification, valuation, rate or input-tax-credit questions, and no estimate of the prospects of any appeal, those being matters for a chartered accountant or counsel on the facts. No timeline promise, notwithstanding section 107(13). No figure for the Tribunal-stage deposit, for the reason given above. Nothing about prosecution or arrest provisions, which are not documentation work. And nothing anywhere above that would help anybody present a ground for which no document exists.
Related work on this site. The notice that usually precedes an order of this kind is dealt with on GST show cause notice reply, and registration matters on GST cancellation. For a demand under the income-tax side rather than GST, see ITAT tax appeal. Where a recovery has already begun against secured assets, DRT and SARFAESI is the separate route, and where the dispute is with a regulator rather than a tax authority, RERA complaint filing sets out that forum instead.
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