ANCHERIL AGENCIES v. THE DEPUTY COMMISSIONER & ORS

Introduction

The petitioner, Ancheril Agencies, challenged the denial of Input Tax Credit (ITC) for the financial year 2017-18 arising from an inadvertent error committed while filing the annual return in Form GSTR-9. Instead of selecting the place of supply as “Kerala”, the petitioner mistakenly selected “Other Territory”, resulting in the tax being reflected under the wrong head and consequently leading to denial of legitimate ITC.

The petitioner contended that the mistake occurred during the initial year of GST implementation when taxpayers were still adapting to the newly introduced compliance framework. It was argued that the error was purely clerical, without any intention to evade tax or derive undue benefit, and therefore should not deprive the petitioner of the substantive benefit of ITC.