A tax department that waits for its certified copy before starting the clock on an appeal is, on the Supreme Court's reading of Section 62 of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, simply doing the arithmetic wrong. The Court dismissed the Assistant Commissioner of Central Tax's appeal against an NCLAT order on 14 October 2026, finding it hopelessly out of time even after accounting for every day of genuine delay the department could point to.
The appeal traced back to the insolvency of Samyu Glass Private Limited, admitted by the NCLT Hyderabad Bench in October 2019, with a resolution plan recorded roughly two years later. The CGST department's grievance over its treatment in that process reached the NCLAT, which dismissed its challenge. Rather than accepting that outcome, the department carried the matter to the Supreme Court, arguing that the forty-five-day limitation period under Section 62, extendable by a further fifteen days on sufficient cause, should be counted from the date it actually received the certified copy of the NCLAT's order rather than from the date the order was pronounced.
Justices S.V.N. Bhatti and N.V. Anjaria, hearing the appeal, rejected that arithmetic. Section 12(2) of the Limitation Act permits exclusion of the time genuinely requisite for obtaining a copy of the order, but that exclusion covers only the interval actually spent in procuring the copy after applying for it. Any period during which the department simply sat on its hands before even filing an application for the certified copy cannot be excluded from the limitation period and must be counted against it like any other day of delay.
Run against the facts, the arithmetic left the department well outside even the generous outer window the statute allows. The combined sixty-day period, the ordinary forty-five days plus the fifteen-day condonable extension, was found to have run from early August to early October 2023. The department did not file its appeal until 21 November 2023, which the Court's own counting placed at the 111th day after the limitation clock started running. No sufficient-cause explanation could bridge a gap that wide once the correct starting point was applied.
The ruling restates, in a context where the stakes are a Revenue department's own appeal rather than a private litigant's, a principle the Court has returned to repeatedly in IBC appeals: sixty days, inclusive of the fifteen-day grace period, is an absolute ceiling beyond which neither the NCLAT nor the Supreme Court has jurisdiction to condone delay. Litigants cannot manufacture additional time by delaying their own application for a certified copy and then treating the eventual receipt of that copy as the true starting point. The limitation period is pegged to the tribunal's act of pronouncing the order, which is a matter of public record the moment it happens, not to the litigant's own pace in collecting paperwork afterward.
Government departments will feel a particular sting from this decision, since they often move through layers of internal approval before authorising an appeal, a process that eats into limitation just as surely as private delay does. Tax authorities and other statutory bodies litigating under the Code cannot treat departmental procedure as a reason the usual clock does not apply to them. If anything, a government litigant that knows an adverse NCLAT order is coming should apply for the certified copy immediately upon pronouncement, rather than waiting for internal file movement to catch up, since only the time spent in the copying process itself will be excluded.
Insolvency professionals and resolution applicants who deal with government creditors inside a CIRP will find this a useful marker of how firmly the Supreme Court intends to hold the line on IBC timelines even where the delayed party is the state rather than a private creditor. The Code's entire architecture depends on finality arriving on a predictable schedule, and a regime that bent its limitation rules for departmental appeals filed months late would undercut that finality just as much as one that bent for anyone else.
For practitioners drafting appeals, the practical takeaway is to treat the pronouncement date, not the certified copy date, as the only safe reference point for counting the sixty-day outer limit, and to apply for the certified copy on the same day the order is pronounced wherever possible, so that whatever delay does occur is at least the kind the law is prepared to excuse.