Malik Sales Corporation Through Its Proprietor Mohammad Khalid Malik vs. Union Of INDIA Through Its Finance Secretary, Department Of Revenue

Facts

The petitioner, Malik Sales Corporation, filed a writ petition before the Punjab and Haryana High Court challenging the validity of service of a notice and an order-in-original. The petitioner contended that uploading these documents on the common GST portal under the tab ‘View Additional Notices and Orders’ did not constitute proper service. The revenue, Union of India and others, were the respondents. The specific tax period and the amount in dispute are not recorded in the judgment. The procedural history leading to this writ petition is not detailed, other than the filing of the writ petition itself.

Held

The Court held that the issue raised in the present writ petition was squarely covered by its previous judgments in Luxmi Traders (supra) and The Amar Cooperative LC Society Ltd (supra). Consequently, the instant writ petition was disposed of in the same terms as those previous judgments. The reasoning for this decision is that the Court had already decided the question of whether uploading notices and orders on the GST portal constitutes proper service. The ratio decidendi is that if a legal issue has been definitively settled by a High Court in prior pronouncements, subsequent similar petitions will be decided in line with those precedents. The operative direction was to dispose of the writ petition in terms of the earlier judgments, and all pending miscellaneous applications were also disposed of.

Key Issues

1. Whether uploading of a notice and an order-in-original in the tab ‘View Additional Notices and Orders’ on the common portal (www.gst.gov.in) amounts to proper service on the petitioner, in view of Section 169 read with Section 146 of the Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017? The petitioner argued that such an upload does not constitute proper service. The respondents/Revenue did not present any specific arguments, but the Court noted that the parties were ad idem that the issue was concluded by previous judgments. The Court relied on its own prior decisions in CWP-27139-2025, Luxmi Traders v. Union Territory of Chandigarh and Others, and CWP-15601-2026, The Amar Cooperative LC Society Ltd. v. State of Haryana and Others.