Quick answer: In Jaiwanti v. Union of India & Ors., decided on 25 September 2026, a Division Bench of the Delhi High Court (Anil Kshetarpal and Vimal Kumar Yadav, JJ.) held that Section 93(1) of the Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 permits a Show Cause Notice proposing tax, interest or penalty to be issued for the first time after the death of the person whose conduct is in question — it is not confined to completing proceedings already commenced in the deceased’s lifetime. The Court rejected the petitioner’s challenge to the constitutional validity of Section 93(1)(b) under Article 14, but granted her liberty to pursue every other objection — including disputed service of the notice and the merits of the penalty — before the statutory Appellate Authority under Section 107, without a limitation bar. It separately directed the Department to account for, and potentially release, ₹15,40,000 seized during the underlying investigation and held since 2020.
Key Takeaways
- Section 93 does not require a pre-death notice. The words “is determined after his death” in Section 93(1) of the CGST Act permit a determination — including of penalty — to be commenced and completed entirely after the taxpayer’s death; they are not confined to proceedings already commenced during the taxpayer’s lifetime and merely concluded posthumously.
- Investigation is not adjudication. That an investigation began and a statement was recorded during the deceased’s lifetime is irrelevant to whether Section 93 permits a post-death determination — the power to determine liability after death flows from the statute itself, not from any pre-death investigative step.
- Article 14 does not invalidate Section 93(1)(b). The provision’s confinement of representative liability to the deceased’s estate, and the hearing safeguards in Section 126(3), gave the Court a rational basis to reject the arbitrariness challenge — a particular adjudication may still fail for want of evidence or fair opportunity, but that does not make the provision itself unconstitutional.
- Income Tax Act analogies do not resolve CGST questions. The Court declined to import either CIT v. Late Dr. K.C.G. Verghese or Kalawati Devi v. ITO — both concerned with a differently worded Income Tax Act provision — treating Section 93’s own language as sufficient to decide the case without recourse to that provision’s deeming fiction.
- A three-year gap did not bar the notice, but a two-year-old cash seizure got its own timeline. While the delay in issuing the SCN did not defeat jurisdiction under Section 93, the Court treated continued, unexplained retention of seized cash as requiring a reasoned justification from the Department on a fixed schedule — independently of the outcome of any appeal.
1. Introduction
Section 93 of the Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 is a short, rarely litigated provision that answers an uncomfortable question: what happens to a GST liability when the person who incurred it dies before the Department gets around to determining it? Jaiwanti v. Union of India is, on the face of the judgment, the first reported occasion on which a High Court has had to construe the provision’s core operative words — “is determined after his death” — against a taxpayer’s argument that they permit only the completion of proceedings already begun, not their commencement, after death.
The case matters beyond its own facts because the fact pattern it presents is not unusual. GST investigations, particularly those conducted by the Directorate General of GST Intelligence (“DGGI”), routinely take years to mature from search to Show Cause Notice (“SCN”). Where the target of an investigation dies during that interval — as happened here, more than a year before the SCN issued — the Department’s ability to proceed against the estate through a legal representative turns entirely on how Section 93 is read. A narrow reading would immunise a large category of pending, pre-SCN investigations the moment the investigated individual dies; a broad reading exposes legal representatives, often family members with no independent knowledge of the underlying transactions, to liability determined years after the event on a record they did not create and cannot supplement.
This article works through the Delhi High Court’s resolution of that tension: its construction of Section 93(1), its rejection of the Article 14 challenge to Section 93(1)(b), its treatment of two conflicting Income Tax Act authorities the petitioner sought to import by analogy, and its separate — and practically significant — directions concerning cash seized from the deceased six years before the judgment.
2. Case Summary and Background
The petitioner, Jaiwanti (referred to in the impugned order as Mrs. Jaiwanti Dabas), is the widow of late Sh. Ankit Dabas. The proceedings against her arose out of a DGGI investigation into alleged fraudulent availment and passing on of input tax credit, and refund of Integrated Goods and Services Tax, on the strength of invoices issued without any corresponding supply of goods — allegations that implicated three entities: M/s P.C. International, M/s Satguru Corporation and M/s B.K. Enterprises.
On 23 July 2020, the residential premises of Sh. Ankit Dabas at Dwarka, New Delhi were searched, and cash amounting to ₹15,40,000 was found. The SCN later recorded that this amount had been “voluntarily submitted” by Sh. Dabas pending completion of the investigation, as security against any tax liability that might arise, and that it was subsequently placed in a fixed deposit with the State Bank of India, R.K. Puram branch. The petitioner disputes the characterisation of the amount as voluntary.
Sh. Ankit Dabas died on 6 May 2021. On 5 October 2021, his cousin, Sh. Sachin Dabas, wrote to the Department enclosing a death certificate and asking that any further inquiry be directed to the petitioner at her address in Gurugram. Nearly three years later — on 31 July 2024 — the Department issued the SCN to several noticees, including the petitioner, invoking Section 93 of the CGST Act to proceed against her as the legal representative of her deceased husband, and proposing a penalty under Section 122(3)(a) of the Act “for the acts and deeds of Late Sh. Ankit Dabas.” The notice also proposed appropriating the ₹15,40,000 towards the liability sought to be fixed.
The petitioner did not participate in the adjudication. She maintains that she never received the SCN; the Department relies on the modes of service under Section 169 of the Act and disputes non-receipt. The Adjudicating Authority proceeded ex parte and, in an Order-in-Original dated 1 February 2025 (which also drew on a corrigendum issued by the Additional Director, DGGI Headquarters, on 16 December 2024, not placed before the Court), produced an operative order containing an internal contradiction: clause AD purports to impose a penalty of ₹1,50,000 on the petitioner “for each instance of contravention” concerning the three named entities, while the immediately following clause AE states that no penalty is imposed on her, in language that is also unclear on whether the ₹15,40,000 was or was not to be appropriated.
The petitioner filed the present writ petition on 23 May 2025, seeking to quash both the SCN and the Order-in-Original as without jurisdiction on the footing that Section 93 could not authorise proceedings commenced after her husband’s death, and separately challenging Section 93(1)(b) as arbitrary and violative of Article 14 of the Constitution. She also sought release of the ₹15,40,000. The Union of India resisted on the ground that Section 93 contains no such temporal restriction, that the investigation and the deceased’s own recorded statement predated his death, that the penalty under Section 122 is a civil rather than criminal liability to which abatement principles do not apply, and that the writ was in any event barred by the availability of a statutory appeal under Section 107, which the petitioner had not filed.
3. Legal Analysis
Maintainability despite the alternate remedy. The Court did not treat the Section 107 appellate remedy as an automatic bar. Relying on Godrej Sara Lee Ltd. v. Excise and Taxation Officer-cum-Assessing Authority (Civil Appeal No. 5393/2010, decided 1 February 2023), it distinguished the question of maintainability from the discretion to entertain a writ, and held that a pure question of law — here, the construction of Section 93 and the constitutional validity of Section 93(1)(b) — may be examined notwithstanding an available alternate remedy. It expressly declined, however, to extend that discretion to the factual and merits-based objections raised by the petitioner: whether the SCN was validly served, whether the alleged contravention was established, whether the conditions of Section 93(1)(b) were satisfied on the facts, the computation of the penalty, and the effect of the internally inconsistent clauses AD and AE. Those questions, the Court held, were properly for the Appellate Authority.
Timing of the writ, and the appeal window. The Court also addressed — favourably to the petitioner — a point the Department could have pressed harder: the Order-in-Original was dated 1 February 2025, and Section 107(1) allows three months from communication for an appeal, extendable by a further month under Section 107(4) for sufficient cause. Even taking the order’s date itself as the date of communication, the writ petition, filed on 23 May 2025, was instituted before the outer, condonable limit expired. Having decided the questions of law, the Court relegated the petitioner to the statutory appeal for everything else, and — because she had been “prosecuting her challenge” before the High Court throughout — granted her four weeks from the judgment to file that appeal, directing that it be entertained and decided on merits without a limitation objection, and permitting her to seek condonation for any residual delay after excluding the time spent on the writ.
Construing Section 93(1). The heart of the judgment is textual. Section 93(1) provides that where a person liable to pay tax, interest or penalty dies, a legal representative who continues the business is liable for that tax, interest or penalty [clause (a)]; and, where the business is discontinued, the legal representative is liable “out of the estate of the deceased, to the extent to which the estate is capable of meeting the charge” [clause (b)] — in either case, “whether such tax, interest or penalty has been determined before his death but has remained unpaid or is determined after his death.”
The petitioner read “is determined after his death” as shorthand for “is determined after his death in proceedings already commenced during his lifetime.” The Court rejected that gloss. It held that the provision’s concluding words draw a contrast between a liability determined before death but unpaid and one determined after death — nothing in that contrast makes a pre-death notice a condition precedent to the latter. Nor, the Court held, do the opening words (“where a person… liable to pay tax, interest or penalty… dies”) assist the petitioner, since the provision itself contemplates that the tax, interest or penalty may be quantified only after death; the underlying liability must still arise from conduct attributable to the deceased under the Act’s substantive provisions, but its determination and enforcement through the legal representative are what Section 93 exists to enable.
The Court was equally clear that the pre-death investigation and the deceased’s recorded statement did not supply, and were not needed to supply, the source of the Department’s power to proceed. Investigation and adjudication, it held, are distinct stages, and it is unnecessary to treat an investigation as the “commencement” of penalty proceedings in order to sustain a determination made entirely after death — that authority is found in Section 93 itself. The Court also took care to keep Section 93 analytically distinct from Section 122(3)(a): the latter supplies the substantive basis on which a person may be penalised for aiding or abetting a contravention; Section 93 is not an independent penal provision but the machinery through which a liability so established can be enforced against an estate through a legal representative, subject to the clause (a)/(b) distinction and, under clause (b), capped by the estate’s capacity to meet the charge.
Distinguishing Shabina Abraham. The petitioner invoked Shabina Abraham v. Collector of Central Excise and Customs, (2015) 10 SCC 770, where the Supreme Court found no statutory machinery under the applicable Central Excise legislation for assessment against a deceased individual’s legal representatives, and held that a mere recovery provision could not supply that gap. The Delhi High Court read Shabina Abraham as turning on the absence of such machinery in that statute — it does not hold that fiscal proceedings invariably abate on death. Section 93 of the CGST Act, by contrast, expressly provides for determination after death and identifies both the representative and the source of payment; the machinery Shabina Abraham found missing is, on this reading, present here.
Declining the Income Tax Act detour. The petitioner also relied on CIT v. Late Dr. K.C.G. Verghese, (2019) 416 ITR 155 (Mad), where the Madras High Court upheld deletion of a penalty initiated after the assessee’s death, notwithstanding Section 159(2)(b) of the Income Tax Act — a provision permitting “any proceeding which could have been taken against the deceased if he had survived” to be taken against a legal representative. The Delhi High Court acknowledged that this decision supports the proposition that death can affect subsequent penalty proceedings, but declined to treat it as a free-standing rule independent of statutory language, noting that the Allahabad High Court reached the opposite conclusion on the very same Income Tax Act provision in Kalawati Devi v. Income Tax Officer, (1981) 21 CTR (All) 62, upholding continuation of penalty proceedings against a legal representative for the deceased’s default. Rather than choosing a side in that Income Tax Act conflict, the Court held that Section 93 of the CGST Act answers the question on its own text, without recourse to the Income Tax Act’s deeming provisions at all. It also distinguished its own earlier decision in Lal Chand Verma v. Union of India, W.P.(C) 8184/2023 (decided 8 January 2025), on the footing that the notice there had issued in the deceased’s own name despite intimation of death, with no notice at all to the legal heir — whereas here the SCN specifically named and invoked Section 93 against the petitioner in her representative capacity, leaving only the disputed question of service to be examined separately.
Article 14. Having rejected the temporal argument, the Court turned to the constitutional challenge to Section 93(1)(b). It held that the provision’s purpose — preserving liabilities attributable to a deceased person’s conduct for lawful determination and satisfaction from the estate — bears a rational relation to the classification it draws, and that clause (b) does not deem the representative to have committed the wrong; it confines payment to what the estate can meet, while the underlying contravention and the conditions of representative liability must still be established by the Adjudicating Authority. The Court accepted that the loss of the person with first-hand knowledge may seriously affect a representative’s ability to explain the record, but held that Section 126(3)’s requirement of an effective hearing, and the availability of a statutory appeal, answer that concern at the level of the provision, even if a particular adjudication might separately fail for want of evidence or fair opportunity. It invoked the presumption of constitutionality and the latitude accorded to economic legislation recognised in R.K. Garg v. Union of India, (1981) 4 SCC 675 — while noting that this presumption does not exclude Article 14 scrutiny altogether — and distinguished Shree Meenakshi Mills Ltd. v. A.V. Visvanatha Sastri, AIR 1955 SC 13, on the ground that it concerned materially different procedures applied to comparable classes of tax evaders, whereas Section 93(1)(b) does not strip ordinary adjudicatory safeguards from any selected class. The constitutional challenge was accordingly rejected.
What was left undecided. The Court was careful to cabin its holding. It expressed no view on whether the SCN was validly served, whether the alleged contravention is in fact established, whether the conditions of clause (b) are satisfied, how the penalty was computed, or what clauses AD and AE actually mean — all of which go to the Appellate Authority, which the judgment directs must proceed “uninfluenced by any observation which may be construed as touching upon their merits.” The Court also expressly declined to treat the internal inconsistency between clauses AD and AE as an independent ground for interference, since neither side had argued the point at the hearing.
4. Practical Significance
For GST practitioners, the immediate significance of Jaiwanti is that Section 93 cannot be resisted on a purely temporal objection: a legal representative facing an SCN issued years after the taxpayer’s death cannot argue that the notice is void merely because no proceeding existed in the taxpayer’s lifetime. That objection, on this reasoning, fails at the threshold, regardless of how long the gap between death and notice has been — the judgment’s own facts involve a gap of more than three years, and the Court found nothing in Section 93 that treats delay of that kind as jurisdictionally fatal (though it may bear on limitation for issuing the SCN under other provisions, a question this judgment did not need to reach).
That said, the judgment leaves considerable room for a legal representative to contest liability on the merits, and practitioners should direct their energy there rather than at Section 93’s applicability. Disputed service is squarely preserved as a live issue for appeal; so is whether the substantive contravention under Section 122 is actually established against the deceased, and whether the discontinuance of business and the estate’s capacity to pay — the conditions that trigger clause (b) specifically — are made out on the facts. A legal representative should treat the SCN’s invocation of Section 93 as settled ground and concentrate the appeal on these fact-specific conditions, together with any internal inconsistency in the adjudication order itself, of the kind this judgment declined to resolve only because it was not argued.
The judgment also offers a template for handling cash or goods seized during an investigation that outlives the person investigated. Rather than adjudicating the disputed question of voluntariness itself, the Court required the Department to furnish a complete account of the amount — its present status, the fixed deposit particulars, interest earned, and any withdrawal or appropriation — and to identify the precise statutory provision and order relied upon for retaining or appropriating it, within three weeks; permitted the petitioner to respond within two weeks of that disclosure; and directed a reasoned decision within four weeks thereafter, with release (together with interest actually earned) of any amount for which no subsisting lawful basis for retention is established. This tracks the Court’s own earlier approach in K.M. Food Infrastructure Pvt. Ltd. v. Director General, DGGI Headquarters, W.P.(C) 328/2024 and 363/2024 (decided 13 February 2024), and gives practitioners representing anyone — heir or otherwise — whose funds remain parked in a departmental fixed deposit years after a search a concrete, time-bound mechanism to invoke, independent of whatever else is happening in the underlying adjudication or appeal.
Finally, the ruling is a reminder to the Department’s own drafting practice: an operative order containing directly contradictory clauses on whether a penalty is or is not imposed creates real risk, and while this Court declined to strike down the order on that ground because the point was not argued, a future petitioner who does argue it may fare differently.
5. Conclusion
Jaiwanti answers, cleanly and on the statute’s own text, a question that GST practice has not previously had to confront in a reported judgment: Section 93 of the CGST Act is not limited to concluding proceedings already on foot when a taxpayer dies; it authorises the Department to commence and complete a determination against a legal representative afterward, subject to the estate-linked conditions the provision itself imposes, and that scheme survives scrutiny under Article 14. The judgment is equally notable for what it refuses to do — it does not import Income Tax Act analogies to answer a CGST question that the CGST Act answers on its own, and it does not treat the constitutional validity of Section 93(1)(b) as foreclosing case-specific challenges to service, evidence or the estate’s capacity to pay in any individual proceeding. For a legal representative facing a stale SCN, the lesson is that the fight worth having is not over whether Section 93 applies at all, but over whether its conditions are actually satisfied — and, where money has been sitting in a departmental account since a search years before, over getting a straight account of what is being held and why.
FAQ
Can the GST Department issue a Show Cause Notice for the first time after the taxpayer has died? Yes, according to this judgment. The Delhi High Court held that Section 93(1) of the CGST Act permits tax, interest or penalty to be determined against a legal representative entirely through proceedings commenced after the taxpayer’s death — it does not require that a proceeding already be pending at the time of death.
Does it matter how long after death the notice is issued? The judgment does not read any outer time limit into Section 93 itself; the notice in this case issued more than three years after death, and the Court found no bar under Section 93 on that account, though it left open whatever separate limitation objections might apply to the underlying Show Cause Notice.
Is Section 93(1)(b) of the CGST Act unconstitutional for exposing a legal representative to liability for a deceased person’s conduct? No. The Delhi High Court rejected the Article 14 challenge, holding that confining liability to the deceased’s estate, together with the hearing safeguards elsewhere in the Act, provides a rational basis for the provision, even though a particular case might still fail for want of evidence or a fair hearing.
What can a legal representative still argue if Section 93 itself is not in dispute? Everything fact-specific: whether the notice was validly served, whether the underlying contravention is actually proved, whether the conditions for representative liability under clause (a) or (b) are satisfied, and how any penalty was computed — all of which this judgment relegated to the statutory appeal under Section 107.
Authorities and Legislation
Applied by the Court:
- Godrej Sara Lee Ltd. v. Excise and Taxation Officer-cum-Assessing Authority, Civil Appeal No. 5393/2010, decided 1 February 2023 (Supreme Court of India) — applied for the distinction between maintainability and the discretion to entertain a writ where an alternate remedy exists, and for the proposition that a pure question of law may be examined despite that remedy.
- Shabina Abraham v. Collector of Central Excise and Customs, (2015) 10 SCC 770 (Supreme Court of India) — considered and distinguished; that case turned on the absence of statutory machinery for post-death assessment under the Central Excise legislation there in issue, whereas Section 93 of the CGST Act expressly supplies such machinery.
- R.K. Garg v. Union of India, (1981) 4 SCC 675 (Supreme Court of India) — applied for the presumption of constitutionality and latitude accorded to economic legislation, without foreclosing Article 14 scrutiny.
- Shree Meenakshi Mills Ltd. v. A.V. Visvanatha Sastri, AIR 1955 SC 13 (Supreme Court of India) — considered and distinguished on the ground that it concerned materially different procedures applied to comparable classes of tax evaders.
- Lal Chand Verma v. Union of India, W.P.(C) 8184/2023, decided 8 January 2025 (Delhi High Court) — the Court’s own prior decision, distinguished on its facts (notice issued in the deceased’s own name with no notice to the legal heir).
- K.M. Food Infrastructure Pvt. Ltd. v. Director General, DGGI Headquarters, W.P.(C) 328/2024 and 363/2024, decided 13 February 2024 (Delhi High Court) — applied by analogy for the approach to seized cash where no lawful justification for continued retention is shown.
Cited by counsel and considered, without governing the result:
- CIT v. Late Dr. K.C.G. Verghese, (2019) 416 ITR 155 (Madras High Court) — cited by the petitioner; a differently worded Income Tax Act provision, and the Court declined to extend its reasoning to Section 93 of the CGST Act.
- Kalawati Devi v. Income Tax Officer, (1981) 21 CTR (All) 62 (Allahabad High Court) — noted by the Court as reaching the contrary view on the same Income Tax Act provision, illustrating why that provision’s case law does not resolve the CGST question.
Legislation considered:
- Section 93, Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 — https://www.indiacode.nic.in/
- Section 122, Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017
- Section 126, Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017
- Section 107, Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017
- Section 169, Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017
- Section 159(2)(b), Income Tax Act, 1961
- Article 14, Constitution of India
- Article 226, Constitution of India
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.