E-way bill system was rolled out for all inter-state
movement of goods from 1 February but technological
glitches on the first day of its rollout forced the
council to defer it indefinitely.
E-way bill is an electronic documentation tracking the
movement of goods and is key prevent underreporting and
evasion of taxes under GST.
“Nearly 6.5 lakh e-way bills are being generated every
day (in the trial phase). We anticipate that around 26
lakh to 50 lakh e-way bills will be generated each day.
We are preparing the system to generate 75 lakh e-way
bills every day,” Modi said adding two rounds of testing
have been completed so far and another one round of
testing is scheduled in the next few days.
More than 9.5 lakh taxpayers and 8500 transporters are
registered on the e-way bill portal.
To prevent the overload on systems caused by some states
also starting e-way bills for movement of goods even
within a state, the group of ministers has decided to
introduce it in a phase wise manner.
“Once e-way bill is rolled out for inter-state movement
of goods, we will wait for a couple of weeks and then
introduce it for intra-state goods movement in a phased
manner wherein a few states will be added every week,”
Modi said.
On simplification of returns filing process, Modi said
there was no unanimity so far in the meeting also
attended by Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani.
Infosys is providing the software and hardware for the
goods and services tax network.
“There is a common consensus that there should be credit
matching and the forms should be simplified. There
should be one return per month but we will take a call
on how to simplify the processes for small businesses.
Credit reconciliation is a must,” he said.
The differences however persist on whether provisional
credit should be allowed or not and whether credit
should be linked to tax payment or not, Modi said,
adding that more consultation will be done for merging
of the different opinions.
The last GST Council meeting held in January had given
its in-principle nod to ease the return filing process.
It was considering doing away with forms such as GSTR 2,
dealing with purchases, and GSTR 3, a comprehensive
return. Instead it had proposed continuing with the
existing simpler summary return form GSTR 3B to be
supplemented with details from invoices to be uploaded
by suppliers on the GSTN.
So far 7.28 crore returns have been filed with GSTN and
nearly 197 crore invoices processed. The number of
registered taxpayers under GST are more than 1.02 crore.
Source::: Live Mint,
dated 24/02/2018.