GST Refund Services

GST refunds are governed by Section 54 of the Central Goods and Services Tax (CGST) Act, 2017, read with Rule 89 of the CGST Rules, 2017.

Section 54(1) — Any person claiming a refund of tax, interest, or any other amount paid may apply in FORM RFD-01 electronically before the expiry of two years from the "relevant date." Explanation 2 to Section 54 defines the relevant date by category of claim — for export of goods, the date the ship/aircraft leaves India or the date the goods cross the border by land/post; for export of services, the date of receipt of payment in convertible foreign exchange (or the invoice date, if payment was received in advance); for a refund arising from an inverted duty structure, the end of the financial year in which the claim arises; and for tax paid by mistake, the date of payment.

Section 54(3) — Refund of unutilised Input Tax Credit is permitted only where the credit accumulation arises from: zero-rated supplies made without payment of tax (exports/SEZ supplies under a Letter of Undertaking), or an inverted duty structure where the tax rate on inputs exceeds the rate on the output supply.

Rule 89 — The refund application in FORM RFD-01 must be accompanied by supporting documents (invoices, shipping bills/export documents, the GSTR-2B statement) and, for claims exceeding ₹2 lakh, a certificate from a Chartered/Cost Accountant under Rule 89(2)(m) confirming that the incidence of tax has not been passed on to any other person.

Refunds not sanctioned within 60 days of a complete application attract interest under Section 56 of the CGST Act.

A GST refund claim is the recovery of tax that the business paid but should not have — unutilised input tax credit accumulated on zero-rated exports, refund of tax paid on the inverted duty structure under Section 54(3) of the CGST Act 2017, refund on deemed exports, or refund of excess tax paid. The mechanism is Section 54 of the CGST Act read with Rules 89 to 91 of the CGST Rules: the claim is filed in RFD-01 on the portal, and the department must sanction or reject it within the prescribed period, with the deficiency process under Rule 90 as the gateway.

The refund is the correction of the cash position. The credit that accumulates on exports and on the inverted duty structure is the business's own money sitting in the ledger, and the refund claim is how it comes back. The process has a discipline — the claim must match the ledger, the invoices and the export data, and every mismatch is a deficiency that restarts the clock.

The cost of an abandoned refund is the permanent cash loss: the unclaimed credit that stays blocked, the amounts that lapse because the claim was never filed or died in the deficiency cycle. For a business with export turnover or an inverted structure, the refund is not a windfall; it is the working capital the business is entitled to under the Act.

This service is for businesses with refundable positions — exporters, inverted-duty manufacturers, deemed-export suppliers. We compute the refundable amount under Section 54, prepare the RFD-01 with the ledger and invoice support, file and track the claim through the deficiency and sanction stages, and handle the rejection and the appeal where the department refuses.