As a business perspective, there is always a chance to resurrect in any ordeal whether from the government or from the market itself and now BPOs are eyeing upon the after effects of GST by sourcing tax filing services to the corporations. Many BPOs and outsourcing companies have sniffed a demand for such organization who wants outsourcing companies to provide them tax filing servicing as the GST demand multiple tax filing in a single month.
One of the companies including HGS has started its operation from Noida to cater to those customers who want such kind of services to file tax returns on behalf of them. It is known that the company, HGS is now extending its operations in Chennai and Mumbai as well, which hints for some growth chances for the emerging line of the field. Srinivas Palakodeti, CFO at HGS stated that “When the system settles down, everyone will have to start uploading their sales invoice, what they call the GST credit check, input credit taken and do the plus-minus — whether they have to pay more or collect a refund. This is a reconciliation exercise at every stage. If there is a mismatch between what you say and what a supplier says, that will throw up an issue, We could manage the process where there are mismatches, it would involve calling up a vendor and pointing out a discrepancy.”
HGS CFO also pointed out that the nature of work would be similar to the accounting and finance genre where there is payment processing part is done for the hospitals and insurers. Also, the work will be an amalgamation of both voice and non-voice services making it parallel to the work of BPOs earlier. The CEOs of BPO companies are currently in search of market opportunities in the name of GST for there organization. They also include those small companies in there search list which apparently cannot afford the services of BPO.
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Sandip Sen, CEO of BPO company Aegis stated that “One thing we are looking at is seeing if it is feasible to create a multitenant shared-services model for smaller companies. So we could maybe aggregate about 50 MSMEs in a process and then they could split the costs across companies to make it more affordable,”. But still there is an issue for the domestic BPO companies and it is related to the longevity of such business model. Milan Sheth, Partner-Advisory Services & Technology Sector Leader at consultancy EY mentioned this into his own words, “In the short term, yes, everyone is looking for extra help and it is an opportunity for BPO firms but in the longer term, GST is designed for automation. We see that bots will be used as the system settles down, Companies are even looking at consolidating their finance and accounting operations in a shared services centre, but I don’t know if that will translate into contracts for BPO players.”
Susir Kumar Mangalore, executive chairman of BPO company Intelenet also said that “The big companies already have Finance & Accounting teams, so they would be able to manage. It’s the next rung of mid-level companies that would likely be interested. They would not likely go and hire a whole new set of people to do GST filing. We are looking at the space.”