A view of the Telangana High Court.
Hyderabad: Hundreds of businesses that tried to wipe out their Goods and Services Tax (GST) demands on the ground that the notices carried no digital signature have lost in the Telangana High Court.
A three-judge full bench dismissed more than 500 petitions on Wednesday, September 30, ruling that GST notices and assessment orders cannot be quashed merely because their summary pages show no signature. The cases together involve around Rs 1,500 crore in State GST liability, according to The Times of India.
The bench of Chief Justice Aparesh Kumar Singh, Justice N Tukaramji and Justice GM Mohiuddin gave the petitioners two weeks to either pay the dues or challenge the judgment in appeal. The ruling overturns earlier division bench decisions on the issue.
The question had been decided the other way before. In a batch of 160 petitions earlier, a division bench of then Acting Chief Justice Sujoy Paul and Justice Renuka Yara had held that notices and orders without the proper officer’s signature could not withstand judicial scrutiny. The state was allowed to issue fresh notices in the prescribed format.
Similar petitions kept coming, and the matter was referred to a larger bench. The full bench was constituted after earlier petitions ended with directions to reissue signed notices.
The petitioners, a mix of individual merchants and firms, said notices and orders under the Telangana Goods and Services Tax (TGST) Act were invalid without a digital signature. They relied on the earlier High Court rulings and on forms such as DRC-07, which they said must carry a signature.
They said some documents displayed messages like “signature invalid” or “not verified”. They also pointed out that the notices were uploaded under the “additional notices and orders” tab, carried no Digital Identification Number (DIN), and were not preceded by any intimation or scrutiny.
The state argued that the rules cited by the petitioners fall under the chapter on registration and do not govern demand and assessment proceedings.
Special government pleader for state tax Swaroop Oorilla told the court that officers can issue notices only after logging into the GST portal with a digital key. He said the signature may not display if the user’s software is outdated. The department had demonstrated the process in court on September 18, 2025, he said. The state told the court these keys are issued by the Telangana technical services department and carry the concerned officer’s digital signature.
Oorilla also cited a clarification by the GST Network (GSTN) in September 2024 that portal-generated documents need no physical signature. “The attachments to both forms carry physical signatures, and petitioners have shown no prejudice,” he submitted.
The state further argued that a Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) circular of June 2025 exempts portal-generated communications from the DIN requirement. Prior intimation became optional from October 15, 2020, and scrutiny is not a mandatory precondition for issuing a notice, it said.
It also maintained that uploading a document on the GST portal amounts to valid service under the Act, and that the petitioners should have gone to the statutory appellate authority instead of the High Court.
This post was last modified on October 1, 2026 9:47 am