Over half of the Rs 91,000 crore goods and services tax (GST) collected for August came in on September 19 and 20, the last two days for paying the month’s tax without interest, Bihar deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi said on Wednesday, attributing the GST Network (GSTN) glitches to such last-minute rush, as the Infosys-developed system is robust.

Modi, who heads a group of ministers (GoM) on improving GSTN’s performance, said after its second meeting with the IT major here that the IT back-end would send reminder text messages to 20 lakh businesses soon to file their GSTR-1 returns on outward supplies in July by October 10.

These firms had filed the summary returns (GSTR-3B) for July but are yet to file the GSTR-1 form. "So far 33 lakh businesses have filed GSTR-1 for July, while 53 lakh had filed the initial GSTR-3B returns. So 20 lakh more businesses have to file in the next six days," he said.

Meanwhile, as many as 43.58 businesses have filed GSTR-3B for August till October 3. The taxes are collected by the government with these summary returns, although it has given leeway for the taxpayers to file the detailed returns much later.

The number of GSTN registrants, including those whop opted for the benign composition scheme, is close to 90 lakh, a quarter of which are new registrants and the others migrants from the previous regime.

For August, the last date for filing of GSTR-3B, which is a short summary return, was September 20 and the tax network saw a rush of 28.64 lakh taxpayers in the last two days to the deadline. The taxes paid on these two days was about Rs 45,600 crore.

However, he felt that there would be a big challenge in the matching of invoices after GSTR-2 (inward supplies) are also filed. The GoM has also asked Infosys to be prepared to handle the load that would come for GSTR-2 filing between October 11 and 31.

The GSTN network, which earlier witnessed certain glitches, has now seen most of the issues being resolved, Modi said. According to him, the network has the capability to handle more than 1 lakh tax returns in an hour. The GoM has also asked Infosys to place its employees at all GSTN centres of the states to ensure smoother functioning.

The GoM had earlier provided Infosys October 31 as the deadline for solving most of the issues with the network. Modi said there were 48 issues that were being individually tracked with eight to nine broader thematic concepts which are being discussed.

 05 Oct 2017, 10:02 AM