GST Central Tax Weekly Tracker — W36 2026 (31 August–6 September 2026)

This week (31 August–6 September 2026): CBIC issued no GST notification, circular, instruction or removal-of-difficulty order anywhere in India. The substantive work of this edition is a first-ever sweep of CBIC's Instructions stream: the 2026 series runs to 15 instructions, of which exactly one is GST — Instruction No. 01/2026-GST of 3 August 2026, whose text is read here in full for the first time.

Top Developments This Week

1. Instruction No. 01/2026-GST, read at last: mining enforcement becomes a standing GST intelligence feed

What it is: the instrument is Instruction No. 01/2026-GST, F. No. GST/INV/Audit Report No. 7 of 2024/33/2024-25, issued by the GST-Investigation Wing of the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs and dated 3 August 2026 (eOffice reference 1/155626/2026). It runs to two pages. W35 disclosed its existence, number, date and official subject line but expressly did not state what it directs, because the text had not been retrieved. It has now been retrieved and read.

Its origin is an audit finding. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India, in a draft performance audit report on the assessment, levy and collection of GST on minerals, recorded that State Mining Authorities routinely detect illegal mining, illegal transportation of minerals, seizures of minerals and vehicles, cancellation or suspension of mining leases and excess extraction — and that no structured or institutional mechanism existed for sharing any of it with CGST field formations. The Board's stated concern is that this material bears directly on suppression of taxable supplies, non-registration, undervaluation, short payment and wrongful availment of input tax credit under the Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 (CGST Act), and was simply not reaching the officers who could act on it.

What the instruction directs. All Principal Chief Commissioners and Chief Commissioners of CGST Zones must ensure five things:

• a Nodal Officer is designated in each CGST Zone for coordination with the respective State Mining Department;
• a mechanism is established with the State Mining Authorities for periodic sharing of information on illegal mining and transportation of minerals detected within the jurisdiction;
• information received is analysed for GST implications, with action initiated wherever warranted under the CGST Act and the rules made under it;
• intelligence generated is disseminated to jurisdictional Commissionerates and DGGI formations where necessary;
• periodic review meetings are held with the State Mining Authorities to test whether the channel is working and to resolve operational issues.

Field formations are directed to circulate it downward for strict compliance, difficulties are to be reported to the Board, and a Hindi version is to follow. It is addressed to all CGST Zones and to the Director General, DGGI, with a copy to the Commissioner (PAC).

Why it matters: this is a standing channel, not a drive. Instruction No. 02/2024-GST of 12 August 2024 launched a time-boxed special all-India drive against fake registrations; this creates permanent plumbing, and the plumbing runs from a State regulator into a Central tax authority. For a quarry operator, crusher unit, mineral trader or transporter, the practical consequence is that a State mining penalty, a seizure memo or a lease suspension is now expected to surface as a GST enquiry — and the trigger will be a document the taxpayer filed with a department that has nothing to do with GST. Reconciling State mining returns against GST outward supplies stops being housekeeping and becomes exposure management.

Two limits are worth stating plainly. The instruction contains no new statutory power — it directs coordination, and everything that follows still runs through the ordinary machinery of Sections 73, 74, 74A and 122 of the CGST Act. And it prescribes no time limits or thresholds: cadence and materiality are left to the zone, so practice will vary zone by zone in the way it did after the 2024 registration drives.

Corpus refs: INS_06_2025 is the highest indexed key in the instruction series and is cited here as a coverage-boundary marker only, not as authority. The instruction itself was queued for ingestion and, as at 8 September 2026, is recorded processed in the GST discovery queue.

Link: Instruction No. 01/2026-GST (3 August 2026)

2. Sweeping the Instructions stream: the whole 2026 series, and why one instrument sat unreported for four weeks

What it is: an inventory, and a permanent change to how this tracker is produced. Until this edition the weekly sweep covered CBIC's notification and circular streams. The Instructions stream had never been swept at all. That is the entire reason Instruction No. 01/2026-GST was live for four weeks and absent from the W32, W33 and W34 editions — no analysis failed, a listing was simply never opened.

Read on 8 September 2026, CBIC's instruction repository holds 584 records spanning 2004 to 2026 across all tax streams. Forty-three of them are GST. The complete 2026 series is 15 records: Instruction Nos. 01 to 14 of 2026-Customs, and Instruction No. 01/2026-GST. The Customs fourteen cover a quality-control order on cross-recessed screws, drawback on unlocked mobile handsets, authorised officers under the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, time-bound RoDTEP and RoSCTL scroll processing, a standard operating procedure for smuggling cases involving foreign diplomats, drawback on SEZ-to-DTA re-exports, a route for seeking Foreign Trade Policy clarifications from DGFT, three Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology compulsory-registration items, data entry in DIGIT, a green channel for oil and hazardous-substance spill response equipment, and two provisional-assessment directions on anti-dumping imports. None of the fourteen carries a GST leg — unlike Circular No. 37/2026-Customs of 27 August 2026, covered in W35, which was a GST circular wearing a Customs number.

The output figures are worth holding on to. Numbered GST instructions ran to eight in 2022, five in 2023, five in 2024 and six in 2025; the 2026 count stands at one. The stream's most recent entry of any kind is Instruction No. 14/2026-Customs of 7 August 2026.

Why it matters: the instruction series is where the Board tells its own officers what to do, and enforcement-side clients are affected by it long before any circular clarifies anything. It carries no gazette number, appears in no rate schedule, and is easy to filter out of a notification-led sweep — which is precisely the failure this edition corrects. Instructions are now a permanent line in the Regulatory Action Log below, swept every week alongside notifications, circulars, removal-of-difficulty orders, Council decisions and FAQs.

Corpus refs: INS_06_2025 — coverage-boundary marker for the instruction series.

Link: CBIC tax information

3. Two live texts of the same rate notification: 2202 99 90 or 2202 91 00?

What it is: the same sweep surfaced a defect in an instrument already in force. CBIC's repository carries two English records for Notification No. 01/2026-Central Tax (Rate). Both are numbered identically, both are dated 30 April 2026, both bear F. No. 190341/139/2026-TRU, both are signed by the same Under Secretary, and both state that they come into force on 1 May 2026. The notification amends Notification No. 9/2025-Central Tax (Rate) of 17 September 2025, itself last amended by Notification No. 19/2025-Central Tax (Rate) of 31 December 2025.

The two texts agree everywhere except one entry. In Schedule I at 2.5 per cent, both substitute 2202 99 21, 2202 99 29 against S. No. 150 and 22029931, 22029939 against S. No. 151. In Schedule III at 20 per cent, against S. No. 2, the earlier upload substitutes 2202 99 90, 2202 99 91, 2202 99 99 — and the later upload substitutes 2202 91 00, 2202 99 91, 2202 99 99. Both files remain downloadable today. The identical divergence repeats in the Integrated Tax (Rate) and Union Territory Tax (Rate) versions of the same amendment, so three notifications are affected.

What is verified and what is not. Verified: two divergent records exist under one number and date, and the difference is the single HSN entry above. Not verified: which text was gazetted. The e-Gazette search interface could not be queried programmatically for this batch, so the operative entry is unconfirmed and nothing here should be read as settling it.

One textual observation, offered as inference and not as a finding: S. No. 3 of the same Schedule is substituted as 2202 99 91, 2202 99 99 in both versions. If S. No. 2 read 2202 99 90, 2202 99 91, 2202 99 99, it would wholly subsume S. No. 3 and leave that entry with no work to do. Reading S. No. 2 as 2202 91 00 — the sub-heading for non-alcoholic beer — avoids that. That points toward the later upload, but it is reasoning about drafting, not proof, and the Gazette is what decides.

Why it matters: classification advice on non-alcoholic beverages turns on exactly this entry, and the difference is a 20 per cent Schedule III placement. A practitioner who downloaded the notification on the day it issued holds a file that differs from the one CBIC serves today, under a number and date that give no hint anything changed. Version-pin the PDF you advised from.

Corpus refs: CGSTR_01_2026, IGSTR_01_2026, UTGSTR_01_2026. All three corpus summaries were generated from the later uploads and carry 2202 91 00; their canonical_url fields point at the updated files. Discovery-queue rows have been filed against all three for gazette verification.

Link: Notification No. 01/2026-Central Tax (Rate) — earlier upload | later upload

Regulatory Action Log

CBIC streams checked for this edition (all read 8 September 2026): notifications — Central Tax, Central Tax (Rate), Integrated Tax, Integrated Tax (Rate), Union Territory Tax, Union Territory Tax (Rate), Compensation Cess and Compensation Cess (Rate); circulars; instructions; removal-of-difficulty and Order-CGST; GST Council decisions and What's New; CBIC FAQs and flyers.

What's Next

• 2026-09-10 — GSTR-7 and GSTR-8 for August 2026 due; the September cycle's first statutory date and the first GST due date after this window.
• 2026-09-11 / 13 — GSTR-1 for August 2026, then the Invoice Furnishing Facility and GSTR-6.
• 2026-09-20 / 22 / 24 — GSTR-3B for August 2026, on the staggering in Rule 61 of the CGST Rules, 2017; 25 September for Form GST PMT-06, the second month of the July–September QRMP quarter; 28 September for GSTR-11.
• 2026-09-30 → 2026-11-30 — Rule 37A cycle: suppliers' GSTR-3B for FY 2025-26 must be filed by 30 September or the recipient reverses the corresponding input tax credit by 30 November 2026.
• 2026-10-31 — the raw sugar tariff rate quota under Notification No. 30/2026-Customs expires; the one-time Advance Authorisation to Tariff Rate Quota conversion route and its IGST payment procedure (Circular No. 37/2026-Customs, covered in W35) run against that date.
• 2026-11-30 — outer limit under Section 16(4) of the CGST Act for FY 2025-26 credit, credit notes and GSTR-1 amendments.
• 2026-12-31 — GSTR-9 and GSTR-9C for FY 2025-26 due under Section 44 of the CGST Act, subject to the Rs 2 crore aggregate-turnover exemption in CGST_15_2025.
• Date unannounced — 57th GST Council meeting. The 56th met on 3–4 September 2025 (COUNCIL_56); a year on, no notice had appeared on gstcouncil.gov.in as at 6 September 2026.
• Watch — the Comptroller and Auditor General's performance audit on GST on minerals was in draft when Instruction No. 01/2026-GST issued. Tabling of the final report is the next event on that thread.

Founder Action Items

• If you hold a mining lease, run a crusher, trade minerals or move them, reconcile now. Instruction No. 01/2026-GST makes State mining enforcement data a routine input into CGST assessment. Any seizure memo, excess-extraction finding, lease suspension or transportation penalty on your file with a State Mining Department should be reconciled against your GST outward supplies before it arrives as a query.
• Find out who your zonal Nodal Officer is. The instruction requires each CGST Zone to designate one. Where a State mining proceeding is already running, knowing who receives that feed is worth more than reacting to what it produces.
• Version-pin any advice given on Notification No. 01/2026-Central Tax (Rate). If you advised on Schedule III S. No. 2 for non-alcoholic beverages using a PDF downloaded on or shortly after 30 April 2026, compare it to the file CBIC serves today. The HSN entry may differ, and the number and date will not tell you.
• Do not treat a quiet CBIC week as a quiet compliance week. No instrument issued between 31 August and 6 September 2026, and the entire September filing cycle still lands from 10 September onward.

(Verbatim text of the notifications, circulars and instructions named above is carried in full on Veritect Legal AI.)

Practitioner Watch-list

• The blind spot named in W35 is now closed, and it was a listing, not a judgement. Instruction No. 01/2026-GST went unreported across three editions because the Instructions stream was never opened. Any sweep built only on notifications and circulars has the same hole. Where a client's exposure is enforcement-side, the instruction series is usually where the operative direction to field formations lives.
• Enforcement instruments travel in the opposite direction to rate instruments. A rate notification reaches the taxpayer through the return. An instruction reaches the taxpayer through an officer, months later, with no gazette number and no portal advisory in between. Instruction No. 01/2026-GST is the current example: a State-to-Centre data channel that will surface as GST enquiries in mineral-sector files.
• A repository record is not a gazette record. Three in-force rate notifications currently exist in two divergent English texts on CBIC's own site. This is the second consecutive week in which the limiting factor on a claim has been e-Gazette retrieval rather than CBIC retrieval.
• Standing GSTAT posture is unchanged. Office Order No. 4/GSTAT/PB/2026 of 29 July 2026, effective 1 August 2026, remained the operative listing regime through the week (CGST_13_2025). Circular No. 256/02/2026-GST of 25 July 2026 continues to fragment Common Adjudicating Authority appeals noticee-by-noticee and bench-by-bench, on the chain begun by CIR_250_2025, and Notification No. 02/2026-Central Tax of 7 May 2026 remains the most recent instrument touching the Principal Bench's powers.
• Standing refund, valuation and registration positions are unchanged. CGST_14_2025 keeps specified suppliers, and anyone without completed Aadhaar authentication under Rule 10B, outside the 90 per cent risk-based provisional release under INS_06_2025. Rule 31D retail-sale-price valuation for pan masala and tobacco (CGST_19_2025, CGST_20_2025) remains operative from 1 February 2026. Rule 9A electronic registration (CGST_18_2025) continues from 1 November 2025. Post-sale discount and credit-note treatment stands on CIR_251_2025.
• Corpus gaps carried forward. No in-force corpus anchor exists for the current 20th/22nd/24th GSTR-3B staggering under Rule 61 — CGST_76_2020 is expressed for October 2020 to March 2021 and is not a substitute — nor for the 2026 circular series, nor for mineral-sector GST enforcement.

FAQ

Did CBIC issue any GST notification, circular or instruction between 31 August and 6 September 2026?

None is recorded. Read on 8 September 2026, the CBIC tax-information repository records five instruments dated inside the window and not one is GST: Notification No. 72/2026-Customs (N.T) of 31 August 2026, and on 1 September 2026 Notification Nos. 46, 47 and 48 of 2026-Central Excise together with Notification Nos. 73 and 74 of 2026-Customs (N.T). At 6 September 2026 the most recent Central Tax notification remained No. 02/2026-Central Tax of 7 May 2026, the most recent GST circular remained No. 256/02/2026-GST of 25 July 2026, the most recent GST instruction was No. 01/2026-GST of 3 August 2026, and the most recent removal-of-difficulty or Order-CGST entry remained Order-01/2022-GST of 21 July 2022.

What does Instruction No. 01/2026-GST dated 3 August 2026 direct?

It creates a standing information channel between State Mining Authorities and CGST field formations. Issued by the GST-Investigation Wing under F. No. GST/INV/Audit Report No. 7 of 2024/33/2024-25, it follows a draft Comptroller and Auditor General performance audit on the assessment, levy and collection of GST on minerals which found no institutional mechanism for sharing mining-enforcement intelligence. Principal Chief Commissioners and Chief Commissioners of CGST Zones must designate a zonal Nodal Officer, establish periodic information sharing with the State Mining Department, analyse what is received for implications under the Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017, disseminate intelligence to jurisdictional Commissionerates and DGGI formations, and hold periodic review meetings. It confers no new statutory power; action still runs through Sections 73, 74, 74A and 122 of the CGST Act.

Why do two different texts of Notification No. 01/2026-Central Tax (Rate) exist?

CBIC's repository carries two English records for that notification, both numbered 01/2026-Central Tax (Rate), both dated 30 April 2026, both bearing F. No. 190341/139/2026-TRU and both effective 1 May 2026. They differ at one entry: in Schedule III at 20 per cent, against S. No. 2, the earlier upload reads 2202 99 90, 2202 99 91, 2202 99 99 while the later reads 2202 91 00, 2202 99 91, 2202 99 99. The same divergence repeats in the Integrated Tax (Rate) and Union Territory Tax (Rate) versions, so three in-force notifications are affected. Which text was gazetted has not been verified and no classification advice should turn on the point until it is.

Research gaps recorded this week

Recorded as gaps rather than findings. (a) The GSTN surface at services.gst.gov.in returned an access-rejection page on every attempt for this batch, so both the August 2026 gross and net GST collection figures — published on the GST portal on or about 1 September 2026, inside this window, since collections ceased to issue by PIB press release per the PIB release of 1 August 2024 — and any GSTN portal advisory issued during the week are unconfirmed in either direction. No figure is quoted and it is not asserted that no advisory issued. (b) egazette.gov.in exposes an ASP.NET postback search that cannot be queried programmatically, so the gazetted text of Notification No. 01/2026-Central Tax (Rate) and its IGST and UTGST siblings was not retrieved; which of the two divergent uploads is operative is unresolved. (c) The verified negatives above rest on the CBIC tax-information repository as read on 8 September 2026. On that date its notification stream ran to instruments dated 1 September 2026, its circular stream to 25 July 2026 and its instruction stream to 7 August 2026. Because the repository is a single system demonstrably updated to 1 September, the earlier edges of the circular and instruction streams are read as reflecting issuance rather than ingestion lag up to that date; for 2 to 6 September 2026 the silence across all three streams cannot be distinguished from lag, and no absence is asserted for those five days beyond the fact that nothing is recorded. (d) Instruction No. 01/2026-GST is a two-page scanned image with no embedded text layer; the account given above rests on our own optical character recognition of the official PDF, so any quotation from it should be checked against the source document before use. (e) gstcouncil.gov.in remains materially behind CBIC's own repository — its CGST notification listing ends at No. 11/2025-Central Tax and its circular listing at No. 250/07/2025-GST — so it was used for Council material only and not relied on for any notification or circular position. (f) No GSTAT caseload or listing figure is quoted; only the announcements page was read.

Sources: CBIC Tax Information | Instruction No. 01/2026-GST | Notification No. 01/2026-Central Tax (Rate) — earlier upload | later upload | Notification No. 01/2026-Integrated Tax (Rate) | Notification No. 01/2026-Union Territory Tax (Rate) | Notification No. 02/2026-Central Tax | Circular No. 256/02/2026-GST | Circular No. 255/01/2026-GST | Notification No. 72/2026-Customs (N.T) | Notification No. 73/2026-Customs (N.T) | GSTAT Announcements | What's New — GST Council | CGST Circulars | CGST Tax Notifications | CBIC GST portal | GST collections on the GST Portal — PIB

Veritect Legal Intelligence publishes this tracker as a public information service. It does not constitute legal advice. All source URLs resolve to Tier 1 government domains only.

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