Quick answer: On 23 September 2026, a Division Bench of the Telangana High Court (Aparesh Kumar Singh, CJ, and Vakiti Ramakrishna Reddy, J.) dismissed a writ petition challenging a best-judgment assessment order passed on 9 January 2024 under Section 62 of the Telangana Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017, for the tax period August 2023. The petitioner argued that because he had since filed the relevant GSTR-3B return, the assessment order stood deemed withdrawn under Section 62(2) and that his GST registration’s cancellation had prevented him from tracking the proceedings. The Court did not decide that argument on its merits. It dismissed the petition because the petitioner offered no explanation for why he waited until September 2026 — roughly two and a half years, and eleven months after the assessment order even before his registration was cancelled — to challenge an order he says he only “noticed” after his registration was later revoked.
Key Takeaways
- A writ court will not reach the merits of a Section 62 “deemed withdrawal” argument if the petitioner cannot explain an unreasonable delay in bringing the challenge. The Telangana High Court dismissed the petition purely on laches, leaving the substantive question — whether filing a return after an assessment order automatically withdraws it — untouched.
- The taxpayer’s own timeline undercut his explanation for the delay. He attributed his inability to track the proceedings to his GST registration’s cancellation, but the cancellation took effect eleven months after the assessment order was passed — leaving an unexplained window during which the registration was still active and the order could have been challenged.
- Section 62(2)’s deemed-withdrawal proviso is not self-executing on any timeline the taxpayer chooses. The provision requires a valid return within a specified window of service of the assessment order; a return filed roughly three months later sits outside even a generously read window, a point the Court did not need to reach but which independently weakens the petitioner’s case.
- Absence of ongoing recovery mattered to the outcome. The Court noted there was nothing on record to show the assessed tax was actually being recovered — a relevant factor in declining to exercise discretionary writ jurisdiction over a stale challenge.
- The order leaves the harder question for another case: what happens when a GST registration’s cancellation genuinely does cut off a taxpayer’s ability to monitor an assessment proceeding conducted entirely through the common portal, and the taxpayer acts promptly once the obstruction is removed. That was not this case, because the cancellation came well after the assessment order issued.
1. Introduction
Best-judgment assessment under Section 62 of the Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 — and its state counterparts, including the Telangana Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 — is one of the more consequential enforcement tools in the GST framework precisely because it operates against taxpayers who have stopped engaging with the system: it lets a proper officer assess tax liability on a non-filer’s behalf, to the best of his judgment, without waiting for a return that may never come. The provision builds in a safety valve — if the taxpayer files a valid return within a specified window after the assessment order is served, the order is deemed withdrawn — but that safety valve only helps a taxpayer who is still watching the portal, or who resumes watching it in time.
On 23 September 2026, the Telangana High Court considered a case in which the taxpayer said he was not watching the portal at all, because his GST registration had been cancelled. Anand Reddy Jejah, a sole proprietor from Mahabubnagar, Telangana, sought to set aside a best-judgment assessment order dated 9 January 2024 for the period August 2023, arguing both that he had since discharged the underlying liability through a later return and that his registration’s cancellation explains why he only found out about the order much later. The Division Bench did not need to resolve either point. It dismissed the writ petition because the timeline the petitioner himself placed on record did not support his account of why he could not have challenged the order far sooner.
This article works through what the Court actually decided — a laches dismissal, not a ruling on the merits of Section 62 — situates that decision against the statutory scheme governing best-judgment assessment and deemed withdrawal, and considers what the order means for taxpayers seeking to rely on a late return, or on a registration cancellation, to excuse delay in challenging a GST assessment.
2. Case summary and background
The assessment and the timeline
The petitioner’s GST registration bore the status of an active registrant when, on 9 January 2024, the Assistant Commissioner of State Tax, Mahaboobnagar Circle, passed an assessment order under Section 62 of the Telangana Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017, in Form GST ASMT-13 (Reference No. ZD360124009489D), assessing the petitioner’s tax liability for the tax period August 2023 at ₹22,75,850. Section 62 assessments of this kind follow non-filing: the provision empowers the proper officer to assess a non-filer’s liability to the best of his judgment where returns required under Section 39 (regular returns) or Section 45 (final return) remain unfurnished even after a notice under Section 46 calling for them.
Almost a year later, on 7 December 2024, the petitioner’s GST registration was cancelled for failure to furnish returns for a continuous period. The petitioner’s case, as recorded in the order, is that this cancellation left him unable to access the GST common portal and therefore unable to track the status of the January 2024 assessment proceeding. Some four months after the assessment order — on 10 April 2024 — the petitioner had, in fact, filed the GSTR-3B return for the period August 2023, declaring and discharging a liability of ₹1,03,35,766, a considerably larger sum than the ₹22.75 lakh the assessment order had computed; the order does not explain the relationship between the two figures, and this article does not speculate on it. On the petitioner’s case, that filing meant the assessment order should be treated as withdrawn under Section 62(2) of the Act.
The revocation and the writ petition
The petitioner’s registration was eventually revoked by the competent authority on 4 July 2026. It was only after that revocation, on the petitioner’s account, that he came to notice the “discrepancy” represented by the still-outstanding January 2024 assessment order. He then filed the present writ petition, W.P. No. 31539 of 2026, seeking a writ of mandamus declaring the assessment order void, illegal, arbitrary, and violative of Articles 14, 19, 21 and 265 of the Constitution of India, of the principles of natural justice, and passed without authority of law.
The Court’s disposal
The Division Bench heard counsel for both sides and did not engage with the constitutional or natural-justice grounds pleaded, nor with the deemed-withdrawal argument under Section 62(2). Instead, it held that it did not “appeal to reason” why the petitioner could not have challenged the assessment order earlier if it had not, in fact, been withdrawn by his April 2024 return — noting specifically that the registration was cancelled only in December 2024, nearly a year after the assessment order, leaving an unexplained interval during which the petitioner remained a registered person with portal access and could have raised the challenge. The Court further observed that nothing on record showed the assessed tax was being recovered from the petitioner through any further proceedings. On that basis, it declined to interfere and dismissed the writ petition, with no order as to costs.
3. Legal analysis
3.1 What the Court decided, and — importantly — what it did not
The disposal here is narrower than the pleadings might suggest. The petitioner asked the Court to declare the assessment order void on constitutional, natural-justice and jurisdictional grounds, and separately argued that the order was, as a matter of statutory operation, already withdrawn. The Division Bench addressed none of that substance. Its entire reasoning is confined to the timeline: an assessment order passed in January 2024, a registration cancelled in December 2024, a writ petition filed in September 2026, and no explanation bridging the gap. The order is, in form and substance, a laches dismissal — a discretionary refusal to entertain a stale challenge under Article 226 — not an adjudication of whether a Section 62 assessment order can, in fact, be treated as withdrawn on the facts pleaded. Any reader treating this order as authority for how Section 62(2) operates would be over-reading it; the Court expressly left that question, and the constitutional grounds, unaddressed.
3.2 The statutory scheme: best-judgment assessment and its safety valve
Section 62(1) of the CGST Act — mirrored in the Telangana Act for State tax purposes — permits a proper officer to assess a non-filer’s tax liability to the best of his judgment, “notwithstanding anything to the contrary contained in section 73 or section 74,” where returns required under Section 39 or Section 45 remain unfurnished even after a notice under Section 46. The provision is deliberately anchored to a registered person’s default in filing, not to any independent inquiry into fraud or suppression, and the assessment order must issue within five years from the date specified under Section 44 for furnishing the annual return for the relevant financial year — a considerably longer limitation window than either the ordinary or extended tracks under Sections 73 and 74, reflecting the fact that a non-filer’s default may not come to light until well after the return was originally due.
Section 62(2) supplies the safety valve central to this case: where the registered person furnishes a valid return within a specified window of service of the assessment order, “the said assessment order shall be deemed to have been withdrawn but the liability for payment of interest under sub-section (1) of section 50 or for payment of late fee under section 47 shall continue.” The text of the Act, as originally enacted, sets that window at thirty days; Parliament has since acted to enlarge the window in some measure to give non-filers a more realistic opportunity to cure the default before the best-judgment figure becomes final, though even on a generously read version of that window the petitioner’s own timeline is instructive: he filed his GSTR-3B for August 2023 on 10 April 2024, roughly three months — not thirty, and not sixty, days — after the 9 January 2024 assessment order. Whatever the precise outer limit of the window as currently in force, a return filed at that remove sits outside it on any plausible reading, which means the deemed-withdrawal argument faced a real difficulty on the merits even before the Court reached for laches to dispose of the case. Critically, even a return filed within the window does not wipe the slate entirely clean: interest under Section 50(1) and late fee under Section 47 continue regardless, so “deemed withdrawal” was never going to mean the petitioner owed nothing.
3.3 Laches in GST writ jurisdiction: why the timeline, not the merits, decided the case
Delay is not itself a statutory bar to a writ petition under Article 226 in the way limitation operates under the Limitation Act for civil suits; it is a discretionary ground on which a High Court may decline to exercise its extraordinary jurisdiction, particularly where the petitioner has slept on a right and where intervening events — settled expectations, absence of ongoing prejudice, or simply the practical difficulty of unwinding a years-old assessment — make it inequitable to revisit the matter. The Division Bench’s reasoning tracks that discretionary logic closely: it did not hold that the petitioner’s substantive case was wrong, only that his own account of why he waited did not survive scrutiny against his own pleaded facts. A petitioner who wishes to excuse a multi-year delay in challenging an assessment order must show that the obstacle he points to — here, loss of portal access — actually covered the period of the delay. Here it did not: the registration remained active for eleven months after the assessment order, and the petitioner offered no account of why, during that window, he neither filed the return promptly nor challenged the order.
The Court’s additional observation — that nothing on record showed the assessed tax was being recovered — is a familiar feature of laches analysis in tax matters: where an assessment sits dormant, without coercive recovery action, courts are more willing to treat the passage of time as itself weighing against interference, on the view that a taxpayer facing genuine, ongoing prejudice from an unlawful order would ordinarily be expected to act with more urgency than one who is not.
3.4 The harder case this order does not present
The order is worth reading precisely for its limits. It does not decide, and should not be read as deciding, that a taxpayer whose GST registration is cancelled can never rely on that cancellation to explain an inability to monitor a pending proceeding conducted through the common portal — a real and recurring practical problem, since Section 169(1)(d) of the CGST Act treats “making it available on the common portal” as valid service of notices, orders and other communications, and a taxpayer locked out of the portal by his own registration’s cancellation has a genuine argument that he cannot fairly be charged with knowledge of what the portal shows. What defeated this petitioner was not that argument in the abstract, but that his own facts placed the cancellation eleven months after the order he sought to challenge, leaving no causal link between the alleged obstruction and most of the delay. A future petitioner whose registration was cancelled before, or contemporaneously with, service of an assessment order — and who moves promptly once that obstruction is lifted — presents a materially different case, and this order does not foreclose it. Nothing here required the Court to consider whether the position would differ if the sequence were reversed, and it did not attempt to.
3.5 Regime and forum: a state tax assessment, tested at the writ stage
The assessment order under challenge was passed under the Telangana Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017, by an officer of the State Tax administration, not under the Central Goods and Services Tax Act by a central GST officer — a reminder that, for most ordinary taxpayers, day-to-day GST compliance, including non-filer assessments of this kind, is administered by whichever tax authority (central or state) has been assigned cross-empowerment over that taxpayer, even though the substantive provisions in the state enactment mirror Section 62 of the CGST Act almost word for word. Nothing in this case turns on any divergence between the central and state texts, and the order does not suggest any exists; the point is simply that a taxpayer receiving a Section 62 assessment from a State Tax officer is subject to the same statutory scheme, and the same deemed-withdrawal mechanics, as one assessed centrally. Nor does the case involve any legacy Central Excise, service tax or CENVAT credit question, or any analogy drawn from that jurisprudence — it is confined entirely to the GST-era best-judgment assessment mechanism, tested here at the threshold of writ maintainability rather than on its substance.
4. Practical significance
For advocates advising a non-filer who has been assessed under Section 62, the immediate lesson is procedural discipline in the return: whatever the currently applicable window under Section 62(2), the safest course is to file the outstanding return as soon as the assessment order comes to notice, well within that window, and to retain clear proof of the filing date so that the deemed-withdrawal argument is available on unambiguous facts. Waiting months, on the hope that a later filing will retroactively unwind an assessment order, is not a strategy this order — or the text of Section 62(2) itself — supports.
Where a taxpayer’s registration is cancelled and a Section 62 assessment is only discovered well afterward, this order makes clear that the taxpayer bears the burden of showing, with precision, that the cancellation (or some other genuine obstruction) actually covered the period of delay. A generic assertion that “the registration was cancelled, so I could not check the portal” will not survive scrutiny if the assessment order predates the cancellation by a material period, as it did here. Counsel drafting such a writ petition should build a clean timeline showing the obstruction in place from at or before the date of the assessment order, or explain concretely why the taxpayer could not reasonably have known of the order despite having portal access during the intervening period.
More broadly, the order is a reminder that a writ court’s threshold gatekeeping on delay can dispose of a case entirely, leaving substantive Section 62 questions — including how long the deemed-withdrawal window actually is following the relevant amendment, and how it interacts with a subsequent registration cancellation — to be tested in a case with a cleaner timeline. Litigants should not treat a dismissal of this kind as any comment on those questions, favourable or otherwise, and should be cautious about relying on this order, or citing it, for anything beyond its facts on delay.
Finally, for revenue authorities, the order underscores that the absence of coercive recovery action on a dormant best-judgment assessment can itself become a factor working in the Department’s favour if the matter is eventually challenged years later — a further reason such assessments, once passed, need not necessarily be pursued through active recovery to retain their practical force against a taxpayer who has not moved to set them aside.
5. Conclusion
Anand Reddy Jejah is, on its face, a case about GST assessment and deemed withdrawal, but it decides neither. What it decides is that a petitioner who waits two and a half years to challenge a best-judgment assessment order, and whose own account of the obstruction to earlier action does not match his own timeline, will not get a hearing on the merits of that challenge. The statutory question the petitioner raised — whether a return filed months after an assessment order, well outside any plausible reading of Section 62(2)’s window, could still trigger deemed withdrawal — remains open, as does the more sympathetic scenario of a taxpayer genuinely locked out of the portal from the outset. For now, the operative lesson is procedural rather than substantive: in GST litigation as much as in any other exercise of writ jurisdiction, the story a petitioner tells about delay must survive comparison with the dates the petitioner himself puts on record.
Authorities and provisions
No judicial precedent was cited or applied in this order; the Division Bench decided the matter solely by reference to the timeline pleaded by the petitioner and the text of the Act.
Legislation:
- Section 62, Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 (assessment of non-filers of returns, and deemed withdrawal on subsequent filing) — https://www.indiacode.nic.in/
- Section 39, Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 (furnishing of returns) — https://www.indiacode.nic.in/
- Section 44, Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 (annual return) — https://www.indiacode.nic.in/
- Section 45, Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 (final return) — https://www.indiacode.nic.in/
- Section 46, Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 (notice to return defaulters) — https://www.indiacode.nic.in/
- Section 47, Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 (levy of late fee) — https://www.indiacode.nic.in/
- Section 50, Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 (interest on delayed payment of tax) — https://www.indiacode.nic.in/
- Section 169, Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 (service of notice in certain circumstances, including by making it available on the common portal) — https://www.indiacode.nic.in/
- Telangana Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 (state-level provisions in pari materia with Section 62 of the CGST Act, under which the assessment order in this case was passed) — https://www.indiacode.nic.in/
- Articles 14, 19, 21 and 265, Constitution of India — https://www.indiacode.nic.in/
This article is not legal advice and does not create an attorney–client relationship. Readers should verify the certified copy of the judgment and any subsequent clarificatory orders before relying on it, and consult a qualified advocate on the facts of their matter.