The circular that made the officer the right officer was issued twelve days after he passed the order
Acting Chief Justice P. Sam Koshy and Justice Narsing Rao Nandikonda rejected a jurisdiction challenge to a GST order-in-original and sent the assessee to its statutory appeal, with the writ period excluded from limitation.
A show-cause notice was issued by the Additional Director of the Directorate General of GST Intelligence. The order-in-original that followed was passed by the Joint Commissioner of Hyderabad GST. The department defended the arrangement by pointing to a circular that designates the Joint Commissioner as the proper officer for cases above two crore rupees — a circular issued on 27 October 2025, twelve days after the order itself. A division bench of the Telangana High Court has still rejected the jurisdiction challenge, and sent the assessee to the appeal it should have filed.
Who the petitioner is, and what it asked for
M/s. Charanji Distributors is a proprietary concern registered under the Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017, trading in spare parts for two-wheelers and three-wheelers. It describes itself as an authorised dealer of established brands including SKF India, Bosch and Tata Steel, and it procures from a range of suppliers.
Its petition under Article 226 asked for two things. First, a declaration that the show-cause notice of February 2025 was void, illegal, arbitrary and without jurisdiction insofar as it invoked Section 122 of the Act against it — the ground being that no proper officer had been assigned under Section 122 before the Board's circular of 27 October 2025. Second, that the order-in-original of 15 October 2025 be quashed insofar as it imposes penalties under Section 122(1)(ii) and Section 125. Violations of Articles 14 and 20 and of the principles of natural justice were also pleaded.
The sequence
Show-Cause Notice No. 91/2024-25-GST was issued on 7 February 2025 by the Additional Director of the Directorate General of GST Intelligence, Hyderabad Zonal Unit. The order-in-original was passed on 15 October 2025 by the Joint Commissioner, Hyderabad GST.
The circular the respondents relied on is dated 27 October 2025. The Court accepted the obvious point about it without argument: it came into existence after both the notice and the order, so it was not in force when the proceedings were initiated or when the order was passed.
Why the point still failed
What the circular does is designate the Joint Commissioner as the proper officer competent to issue the show-cause notice and undertake the consequential adjudication in cases involving a monetary limit of more than two crore rupees.
In this case the amount involved exceeds two crore rupees, and the order-in-original was in fact passed by the Joint Commissioner. So the officer who passed the order and the officer whom the allocation of functions designates as proper for matters of this size are one and the same person. The Bench made the point directly: on that footing, and having regard to Section 160 of the Act, the order cannot be assailed merely on this ground.
Section 160 is the provision that saves proceedings from being invalidated by defects in form or by mistakes that cause no prejudice. Read with the coincidence of officers here, it left the challenge with nothing to work on. The submission that the notice and the order were issued by an officer lacking jurisdiction was not accepted, and the proceedings were held not to be without jurisdiction on the ground urged.
The logic is worth separating from the circular that prompted it. The Bench did not hold that a circular can validate a past exercise of power retrospectively. What it held is narrower and turns on identity: the person who adjudicated is the same person whom the allocation of functions treats as proper for a case of this size, so even if the designation arrived later, nobody adjudicated who should not have. The objection was about the label on the officer, not about who sat.
Why the circular argument was attractive
The petitioner's point was not a technicality dressed up. Section 122 of the Act is the penalty provision, and the penalties actually imposed were under Section 122(1)(ii) and Section 125. The argument was that the power to proceed under Section 122 had not been assigned to any proper officer at all until the Board's circular of 27 October 2025 said who that officer was — so when the notice issued in February 2025 invoked Section 122, and when the order imposing those penalties was passed in October 2025, there was nobody lawfully seized of the power.
Put that way the chronology does the arguing. On the department's own case the designation arrived after both steps. What defeated it is that the designation, when it came, named the officer who had in fact adjudicated, and the case fell squarely within the monetary band for which he was named.
Everything else belongs in the appeal
On the remaining attacks on the validity of the notice and the order, the Bench did not go into the merits at all. It was not in dispute that the order-in-original is an appealable order, and the petitioner has an efficient alternative remedy by way of an appeal to the competent appellate authority. On the main contention having failed, the writ petition was held liable to be dismissed, with liberty to the petitioner to take that appeal and to raise in it all such contentions as are available.
Order
The writ petition was dismissed, with no order as to costs, and the pending miscellaneous applications stand closed.
One protection was built in. If the petitioner now goes to the appellate authority, the period spent pursuing this writ petition is to be excluded in computing limitation, in accordance with law and subject to the applicability of Section 14 of the Limitation Act, 1963. The matter had been reserved on 30 April 2026 and was pronounced on 13 October.