GST Council Recommendations on IT Roadmap
The 39th GST Council
met under the Chairmanship of Union Finance & Corporate Affairs Minister Nirmala
Sitharaman on 14 March 2020. The meeting was also attended
by Union Minister of State for Finance & Corporate Affairs Anurag Thakur besides Finance Ministers
of States & UTs and seniors officers of the Ministry of Finance.
In the GST Council meeting, Nandan Nilekani, on behalf of Infosys,
made a presentation addressing the system related issues that are being faced by
the taxpayers in the GST system. He first gave the summary of the recently observed
IT issues and the way forward to resolve them.
He suggested that in order to smoothen the rollout
of the new return system, and to ensure a better uptake of the new return, the transition
to the new return system may be made in an incremental manner. He suggested that
the process may be initiated by addressing the compliance related issues first so
that the problem of tax evasion and gaming of the system due to non-linking of FORM
GSTR-1 and FORM GSTR-3B is addressed immediately. The journey could start
with linking of the details of the statement of outward supplies in FORM GSTR-1
to the liability in FORM GSTR-3B. This would be followed by the linking of
the input tax credit in FORM GSTR-3B to the details of the supplies reflected
in the FORM GSTR-2A. In order to tackle evasion and preventing the gaming
of the system, implementation of Aadhaar authentication
and spike rules would also be initiated.
He informed the Council that to augment the capacity
of the IT system to concurrently handle 3 lakh taxpayers from the present level
of 1.5 lakh taxpayers, hardware procurement process has been initiated which is
slightly impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The GST Council further made the following suggestions
after due discussions-
a.
Nandan Nilekani would attend the next 3 meetings
of the GST Council and update the council of the status of implementation of the
decisions taken by the Council and assist the Council in taking appropriate decisions
on technology related issues,
b.
To support the timely implementation
of various initiatives, the Council gave a go ahead for deployment of additional
manpower (60 in number) on T&M basis and assured that both on procurement of
additional hardware and hiring of manpower, expeditious approvals would be given
however the return filing experience of the taxpayers and removal of technical glitches
needs to be carried out urgently.
Nandan Nilekani assured that he would personally
monitor the progress of the GSTN project and also agreed to attend the IT-GoM for the next 6 months or till such time the initiatives
are implemented. The GST Council expects these initiatives to be implemented by
the 31st of July, 2020.