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This is the one that catches people off guard, because it never feels urgent until you add it up.

GSTR-3B and GSTR-1 split as ₹25 CGST + ₹25 SGST (or ₹10 + ₹10 for NIL).

Put a number on it and it stings more than it sounds. Say a small trader misses their GSTR-3B deadline by 45 days with ₹30,000 in tax sitting unpaid. That's ₹50 × 45 = ₹2,250 in late fee, plus roughly ₹666 in interest at 18% for that period. Not catastrophic on its own — but stretch the same delay to four or five months across multiple return periods, and the late fee alone starts looking like a real line item before interest or any penalty even enters the picture.

The CGST Act treats genuine mistakes and deliberate evasion very differently, and which bucket you fall into changes the math a lot.

• Sec 73 Honest errors

  Short payment, wrong ITC claim, and non-payment that wasn't fraud or willful suppression. The penalty here is 10% of the tax due, with a floor of ₹10,000. If you pay up before the department formally raises a demand, this is usually the cheapest path out.

• Sec 74 Fraud or willful misstatement

  The penalty jumps to 100% of the tax due, essentially doubling what you owe, and in serious cases, prosecution becomes a real possibility, not just a theoretical one.

• Sec 122 21 specific offenses

  Issuing invoices without an actual supply behind them, not maintaining proper books, or obstructing an officer during inspection. Fake invoicing draws a penalty equal to 100% of the tax involved, or ₹10,000, whichever is higher — and GST officers now cross-check invoice data against e-way bills and supplier filings, making this one of the easier categories to get caught in.

• No Reg. Operating without registration when required

  10% of the tax evaded (minimum ₹10,000) if it looks like an oversight, 100% if it looks deliberate.

A show cause notice (SCN) isn't a final verdict — it's the department asking you to explain yourself before it decides anything. What matters is what you do in the next 30 days, because that's your window to file a written reply.

Miss it, and the department can pass an ex parte order — meaning it rules on the matter without ever hearing your side. At that point your options shrink considerably; you're appealing a decision instead of shaping one.

If you do respond and the order still goes against you, you're not stuck. You can appeal to the Appellate Authority under Section 107, but only within three months of the order date, so that clock matters just as much as the first one did.

Most GST penalty cases trace back to the same handful of habits: filing returns late out of pure procrastination, treating NIL months as optional, not reconciling GSTR-2B before claiming ITC, and letting paperwork pile up until reconstructing it becomes its own project. None of that requires deep tax expertise to fix; it mostly requires a calendar reminder and the discipline to file even when there's nothing exciting to report that month.

If you're already past that point and staring at a notice or a late fee that's been compounding for a while, the fastest way out is usually getting someone to look at the exact numbers — which return, how many days, fraud or genuine error — because the difference between those categories is the difference between a manageable fee and a penalty that doubles your tax bill.

It's also worth saying plainly: a GST penalty rarely shows up out of nowhere. There's almost always a paper trail of missed deadlines, mismatched invoices, or a registration that should have been filed earlier, and that trail is exactly what a CA reviewing your case will want to see first. Bring your GSTIN, the return periods you've missed, and copies of any notice you've received, and most cases can be scoped out within a day. The earlier that conversation happens, the fewer options have closed off by the time you have it.