In May 2026, the Ministry of Finance notified that the Principal Bench of the Goods and Services Tax Appellate Tribunal (GSTAT) will now function as the National Appellate Authority for Advance Ruling. This is a structural milestone in India's GST litigation framework. For the first time, businesses and professionals have a unified, national-level forum to resolve conflicting Advance Rulings passed by different state-level Appellate Authorities for Advance Ruling. What is an

GSTN has issued a new advisory outlining important changes to the e-Invoice and e-Way Bill API systems, effective from August 1, 2026. The most significant change: when Ship-to information is present in a B2B invoice, the Ship-to GSTIN becomes mandatory. This affects businesses involved in bill-to ship-to transactions where goods are delivered to a location different from the billing address. What is a Bill-to Ship-to Transaction? In a bill-to ship-to arrangement, Company A b

From January 1, 2026, the GST portal permanently blocks filing of returns older than three years from their due date. This is not a soft warning or a deferral. Once a period crosses the three-year line, it is blocked forever. Any unreported tax or unclaimed ITC for that period is gone — while exposure to demand and penalty under Section 73 or 74 of the CGST Act remains. Which Returns Are Affected? The three-year filing bar applies to GSTR-1, GSTR-3B, GSTR-4 (composition schem

From April 1, 2026, the Invoice Management System on the GST portal is no longer optional. Every regular GST-registered taxpayer who files GSTR-3B must now use IMS to manage inward supplies before filing. If you have been ignoring the IMS tab on the GST portal, that approach will now cost you money. What is the Invoice Management System? IMS is a system on the GST portal where supplier invoices, debit notes, and credit notes appear before flowing into your GSTR-2B. You have t

From July 2025, the GST Network made a change that every business owner and accountant must understand: the outward liability fields in GSTR-3B are now hard-locked. This means you can no longer manually edit the tax liability figures in your GSTR-3B return. The portal pulls the numbers directly from your GSTR-1 or IFF filing, and those numbers are final. What Changed and When Until June 2025, GSTR-3B was an editable summary return. You could adjust the auto-populated values b