https://www.taxtmi.com/caselaws?id=776419 A refund claim was not time-barred merely because the duty was not paid under a rigid formal protest format, where audit-triggered differential duty payments were accompanied by letters sufficiently informing the Department that the payments were under protest. However, the refund still failed because the assessee did not rebut the statutory presumption of unjust enrichment: the duty burden was not shown to have remained unpassed, the amounts were treated as expenditure in the books, and there was no convincing proof of non-recovery from customers. The claim therefore succeeded on limitation but was denied on unjust enrichment, with the refundable amount liable to be credited to the Consumer Welfare Fund. en-us Fri, 08 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0530 Mon, 11 Aug 2025 08:43:24 +0530 TaxTMI RSS Generator https://www.taxtmi.com/caselaws?id=776419 A refund claim was not time-barred merely because the duty was not paid under a rigid formal protest format, where audit-triggered differential duty payments were accompanied by letters sufficiently informing the Department that the payments were under protest. However, the refund still failed because the assessee did not rebut the statutory presumption of unjust enrichment: the duty burden was not shown to have remained unpassed, the amounts were treated as expenditure in the books, and there was no convincing proof of non-recovery from customers. The claim therefore succeeded on limitation but was denied on unjust enrichment, with the refundable amount liable to be credited to the Consumer Welfare Fund. Case-Laws Central Excise Fri, 08 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0530 https://www.taxtmi.com/caselaws?id=776419