Online process for GST refund notified – A summary:

written by GST expert | December 4, 2019

Under GST refund is a major concern for people who are into export of Goods or service or who are under inverted duty structure. When GST was introduced it was said that all refunds would be processed online and assessee will not be required to visit GST officer for their refund process. However that was not the case on ground level, for instance in a case where export was done under LUT, in such cases refund of ITC needed to be claimed offline and one was required to visit GST office and submit all details manually to the GST officer. Same was the situation in case of an assessee who were under inverted duty structure. Only the people who used to pay tax on export were able to get online refund.

Now, vide circular no. 125/44/2019, CBIC has announced that from 26.09.2019 the online system for refund has been fully deployed and now mostly all the situations would be covered under online refund process by filing Form RFD – 01, which includes:

  • Refund of unutilized input tax credit (ITC) on account of exports without payment of tax;
  • Refund of tax paid on export of services with payment of tax;
  • Refund of unutilized ITC on account of supplies made to SEZ Unit/SEZ Developer without payment of tax;
  • Refund of tax paid on supplies made to SEZ Unit/SEZ Developer with payment of tax;
  • Refund of unutilized ITC on account of accumulation due to inverted tax structure;
  • Refund to supplier of tax paid on deemed export supplies;
  • Refund to recipient of tax paid on deemed export supplies;
  • Refund of excess balance in the electronic cash ledger;
  • Refund of excess payment of tax;
  • Refund of tax paid on intra-State supply which is subsequently held to be inter State supply and vice versa;
  • Refund on account of assessment/provisional assessment/appeal/any other order;
  • Refund on account of “any other” ground or reason.

The above list mostly covers all the situation of refund.

They have even mentioned a comprehensive list of documents in Annexure – A of the circular which includes all the documents which one needs to upload to get their refund and each attachment should be of 5MB or less. It has been further stated that jurisdictional officer needs to dispose off the above application within 15 days of it’s generation on the portal. It has been further stated that since GSTR – 2 and 3 were not implemented refund would be issued on provisional basis and if any discrepancy is found in the claim the applicant will provide an undertaking that he/she shall refund the amount along with interest.

Once a deficiency memo has been issued under RFD – 03 the applicant will have to make a fresh application and previous application shall not be processed.

After going through the refund application if the officer is satisfied he can sanction the refund within 7 days of acknowledgement. Even if officer is not fully satisfied he can sanction 90% of refund claim on provisional basis.

In the end if we check the ground reality such online process is still not fully implemented and we must wait and watch when it will be fully implemented because now also many practicing CA applies for refund online and they don’t get any reply for days and when they go and meet the officer he is not aware of any such application being made online and he again asks for all documents offline. So first the government should train the officers and make them well versed with online system.

You can read the entire circular here:

If you need assistance you can ask a question to our expert and get the answer within an hour or post a comment about your views on the post and also subscribe to our newsletter for latest weekly updates.