The Telangana Appellate Authority of Advance Ruling (AAAR) in the case of M/s. Magnetic Infotech Pvt Ltd vide Order No. AAAR. COM/11/2022 dated 22.11.2022, has ruled that there is no GST exemption on sub-contract services to educational boards.

In this case, the applicant is in the business of providing pre and post-examination services to educational boards, universities, and open universities. The applicant has entered into agreements with various educational institutions located in different states.

The services include the processing of examination results. It involves the collection of examination forms from students and their processing, including the generation of checklists that are sent to the corresponding educational institutions for verification and error correction. It also involves the checklist corrections being updated to make it error-free data, the generation of hall tickets or admit cards, and photo attendance sheets that are sent to the examination centers. processing the nominal roll data, generation of OMR sheets for obtaining marks, and conducting the examinations with the nominal roll data and student information.

The post-examination services include getting the marks awarded from the evaluation centers, capturing the data, summarising it, and purifying it, processing the examination results by applying all the rules and generating the result sheet, tabulating the results, and declaring the results, and then issuing the marks memos to the students.

The applicant sought an advance ruling on the issue of whether GST exemption is available to the applicant in respect of the pre and post-examination services being provided to the educational boards and universities (including open universities).

The members of the authority for advance ruling did not reach a unanimous decision.

The AAAR has observed that the exemption would be available when the services are provided “to” an educational institution for services relating to admission to or the conduct of examination by the institution.

Further, the AAAR noted that the main contractor to whom the applicant is to provide services as a subcontractor is not an educational institution and that, though the services are allegedly being provided to educational boards and universities by the main contractor, the exemption contained in the impugned notification is not available to the applicant. When the exemption contained in a notification is to be claimed, an applicant is to satisfy the conditions prescribed therein. The wording of any notification has to be strictly read to allow or deny any exemption.