The Hon’ble High Court of Madras vide its order dated 17.10.2022 in the matter of M/s S.S.G. Apparels Represented By Mrs. Shriisumithaa, Partner Vs. The Deputy Assistant Commissioner GST (Central Taxes), The Superintendent, Tirupur – II in WP No. 17918 of 2020 and WMP. Nos. 22201 & 22202 of 2020, allowed the assessee to file an application for restoration of its registration, when the request for the cancellation of registration was made by its accountant mistakenly.

The Petitioner filed the writ petition before the Hon’ble High Court challenging the order dated 30.09.2020 cancelling its registration under the provisions of Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 (in short ‘Act').

It was submitted on the behalf of the petitioner that while filing the form for registration, the factory address of the petitioner being ‘No.8/829, Vigneshwara Nagar, Kanakkanthottam, Tirupur’ had been included twice under the column ‘additional places of business in the state'.  Therefore, the petitioner in order to rectify the said error, made an attempt to submit an application for amendment of registration certificate.  However, while filling the application Online, the Accountant had selected ‘cancellation’ from the drop-down menu instead of ‘modification'.  It is thus that the impugned order has come to be passed cancelling the registration with effect from 01.05.2020.

On the other hand, on the behalf of the respondents, it was contended that the registration was cancelled only on the request made by the petitioner.  Hence it is for the petitioner to seek revocation of the same, in terms of the revisional remedies available.  However, the counter does not dispute the explanation given by the petitioner or state that the error was not caused on account of an inadvertent mistake.

Held: –

• The Hon’ble Court after considering the submissions made and facts of the case, in the interests of substantial justice accepted the explanation tendered by the petitioner and it was held that request for cancellation was only a simple and inadvertent error.
• Therefore, the impugned order is set aside and the petitioner is permitted to make an application seeking restoration of its registration, providing the correct details of the principal and additional places of business.

The Hon’ble Court with the above findings, allowed the writ petition by setting aside the impugned order.  Since the petitioner states that it will not be granted access online to file an application in view of the cancellation of registration, it is permitted to make the application manually before Deputy Commissioner, GST (Central Taxes), who shall restore the registration within a period of two (2) weeks from date of receipt of the application.