A missing digital signature does not void a GST notice. A missing DIN does. Telangana's Full Bench answers a reference for nearly 200 assessees

Chief Justice Aparesh Kumar Singh and Justices N. Tukaramji and G.M. Mohiuddin hold that electronic authentication on the common portal is enough, and overrule the contrary view in Bigleap Technologies.

Download a GST show cause notice from the common portal and you will usually find no visible digital signature on the face of it. Nearly two hundred assessees in Telangana built a challenge on that absence, saying such a document is unsigned and therefore a nullity — and one Division Bench of the High Court had agreed with them. A Full Bench has now held the opposite. Electronic authentication by the proper officer, followed by upload to the portal, produces a valid document and valid service. But the Bench drew one hard line of its own: a notice or order without a DIN or RFN on it is invalid, whatever else is right about it.

Why it went to three judges

The writ petitions were referred to a Full Bench by a Division Bench order of June 2026, which sought an authoritative pronouncement in view of the decision in Bigleap Technologies and Solutions Private Limited v. State of Telangana on the issue of unsigned orders and show cause notices. The referring Bench recorded that the point involves a substantial and novel question of law and a question of statutory interpretation with far-reaching systemic consequences, and so required a larger forum.

The question, as the Full Bench framed it, was whether the impugned documents — show cause notices or adjudication orders — are unsigned documents within the meaning of the Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017, the Telangana Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 and the Integrated Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 read with the Information Technology Act, 2000, and as such a nullity in the eye of law.

The scale of the hearing matched the stakes. The batch runs to some 190 writ petitions filed across 2024 and 2025. Arguments were led for the petitioners by one counsel on behalf of all, with a nodal counsel and more than a dozen others making additional points in their own matters. The Advocate General appeared for the State, assisted by the Special Government Pleader and an Assistant Government Pleader for State Tax. The Additional Solicitor General of India appeared for the Goods and Services Tax Network, which had been impleaded as a party, and the Senior Standing Counsel for the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs also made submissions on GSTN's behalf. Judgment was reserved in July 2026 and delivered at the end of September.

The statutory material the Court had to reconcile is unusually wide for a tax case: the CGST Act and Rules, their Telangana counterparts, the Information Technology Act as amended together with its Second Schedule, the Information Technology (Certifying Authorities) Rules, 2000 and the Digital Signature (End Entity) Rules, 2015. Forty-two authorities were cited between the parties.

A challenge to the reference itself

Before the merits, the petitioners attacked the reference. They argued that the referral order does not frame the questions to be answered, and does not indicate any conflict between coordinate Benches requiring a Full Bench at all; and, relying on a Gujarat High Court decision, that the Chief Justice does not authorise a reference in his administrative capacity.

The Advocate General and the Senior Standing Counsel for the CBIC rebutted that strongly, pointing to three conflicting decisions of three coordinate Benches of the same Court — Silver Oak Villas LLP, Sahithi Marketers and Bigleap Technologies. In Bigleap Technologies a Division Bench had gone so far as to hold that the contrary view on an unsigned DRC-07, taken without considering Chapter XVIII of the CGST Rules and the prescribed Form, was per incuriam; and it had accepted the State's submission that an unsigned document is not hit by Rule 26(3), which sits in the chapter on registration rather than demands and recovery.

That history is what makes the reference necessary rather than optional. Three Benches of one High Court had reached three positions, one of them declaring another per incuriam, on a question that determines whether thousands of adjudications stand. The Full Bench noted that the referring Bench had heard the matters at length and reserved them before referring, and that the referral order records due deliberation.

The argument from the face of the document

The petitioners' case had an intuitive force that explains why it attracted so many filings and at least one favourable Division Bench ruling.

The prescribed Forms under Chapter XVIII of the CGST Rules contemplate signature. A document that reaches the taxpayer bearing no visible signature — digital or otherwise — looks on its face like an unauthenticated piece of paper, and the law has long treated an unsigned order as no order at all. If that is right, everything that follows from the notice collapses with it: the adjudication, the demand, the recovery, and the limitation clock that runs against the assessee.

The counter-argument, which the Bench accepted, is that the question cannot be answered by looking at the downloaded copy. Authentication in an electronic system happens inside the system. The proper officer acts on the portal under credentials that the statutory framework recognises, and the document is then generated and made available to the taxpayer. Whether that process satisfies the law is a question about the process, not about what is printed at the bottom of the page.

Rule 26(3) is where much of the argument was fought, and its placement matters. That rule requires certain documents to be signed or verified through electronic verification code, and it sits in Chapter III of the CGST Rules, which deals with registration. Demands and recovery — the chapter under which a show cause notice in Form DRC-01 and a summary order in Form DRC-07 are issued — is Chapter XVIII. The State's position, accepted in Bigleap Technologies and now by the Full Bench, is that a signing requirement written into the registration chapter does not travel to the demands chapter, and that Chapter XVIII contains no equivalent command.

What the Full Bench held

The conclusions are set out compactly and are best taken one at a time, because they do not all run the same way.

First, on the signature itself. Having considered the provisions of the Information Technology Act read with the Second Schedule, the Certifying Authorities Rules and the End Entity Rules, together with the manner and procedure by which show cause notices and orders under Chapter XVIII of the CGST Rules are electronically authenticated and made available on the common portal, the Court held that the plea that they are invalid or a nullity in the absence of a visible digital signature is not correct. The presence of a digital signature on the Forms, it held, is not a requirement for documents covered by Chapter XVIII. The contention that these documents are not digitally signed as provided in the Forms does not merit acceptance.

Second, on validity and service. Show cause notices and orders electronically authenticated by the proper officer and uploaded on the common portal are valid documents in the eye of law. And their being made available on the common portal amounts to valid service in terms of Section 169(1)(d) of the CGST Act — the clause that treats making a document available on the portal as one of the prescribed modes of service.

Third, and cutting the other way, on the document identification number. The Bench held that the absence of a DIN or RFN on any of these documents would render it invalid. That is a free-standing requirement, and it survives the rest of the judgment intact.

Fourth, on limitation. The period for availing a statutory remedy, or for making other compliances, runs from the date on which the show cause notice or order is uploaded on the common portal. That answers the practical question that follows from treating upload as service: the clock starts when the document goes up, not when the taxpayer happens to see it.

Fifth, on the precedent that prompted the reference. The contrary view taken in the decisions relied on by the petitioners on this issue, including Bigleap Technologies, does not lay down the correct position of law.

The DIN requirement is the part to read twice

It would be easy to read this judgment as a clean win for the revenue, and on the central question it is. But the holding on the document identification number is not an aside, and it gives taxpayers a ground that is easier to establish than the one they lost.

A DIN is a computer-generated identifier that ties a communication to a record in the department's own system, introduced precisely so that a taxpayer can verify that a notice is genuine and the department can be held to what it issued. The Full Bench's formulation is unqualified: its absence renders the document invalid. That is a defect visible on the face of the paper, requires no argument about the Information Technology Act, and applies to every document in Chapter XVIII.

The architecture that emerges is coherent. The law does not demand a visible signature because authentication is established by the system; but it does demand the identifier by which the system's act can be traced and checked. Remove the trace and the document loses the thing that made the missing signature tolerable.

Order

Having answered the reference, the Court turned to what should happen to the batch. Noting that the writ petitions had remained pending for a considerable length of time and that the challenge resting on the plea of an unsigned document had failed, it granted the petitioners liberty to avail the statutory remedy of appeal within two weeks from the date of judgment.

It added, pointedly, that it remains open to the petitioners to raise such other grounds of law and fact as have been left open while answering the reference, in any such appeal, in accordance with law. The reference was answered accordingly and all the writ petitions were disposed of in those terms, with no order as to costs and pending miscellaneous applications closed. The registry was directed to mark a law-report copy.

That two-week window is the most immediately consequential line in the judgment. Assessees who went to the writ court in 2024 and 2025 rather than appealing have been waiting on a question of law, and the ordinary appellate limitation has long since run against most of them. The Court has reopened the appellate route, but briefly, and the grounds that survive are the ones that were never decided — the merits of each demand, rather than the manner of the notice.

Two practical consequences follow from the holding on service that are worth separating out, because they bind taxpayers who never litigated this question. The first is that a taxpayer cannot say he was never served because nothing reached him by post or email: upload is a prescribed mode under Section 169(1)(d), and the Court has held it is a complete one. The second is that limitation runs from upload. A business that does not check the portal regularly can therefore lose an appellate remedy without ever having read the notice — which makes portal monitoring a compliance obligation in substance, whatever the statute calls it.

The wider significance is about how electronic tax administration is to be judged. The GST system was built on the premise that the portal is the channel: notices are generated there, served there and answered there, and the paper a taxpayer prints is a copy rather than the original instrument. A ruling that an unsigned printout is a nullity would have unwound a large share of the adjudications completed since 2017 across the country, which is why the referring Bench spoke of systemic consequences. This judgment stops that, and does so with reasoning drawn from the Information Technology Act rather than from convenience.

It will not be the last word. High Courts have divided on this question — the citations in this judgment range across Delhi, Bombay, Madras, Allahabad, Rajasthan, Kerala, Orissa, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh — and a Full Bench of one High Court declaring another Bench's view incorrect settles the position in Telangana while sharpening the conflict elsewhere. For now, assessees in the State have a narrow procedural window and one surviving line of attack, and that line is the DIN.