The first month of the current fiscal year will witness new changes in the reporting of GST collections. The move comes at the back of the Finance Ministry’s attempt to get rid of the delay that cripples actual revenue accrual. Starting from April, monthly collections for the current month will now be reported on the first working day of the following month. Reportedly, the move to cash basis accounting from this fiscal year and reporting the amount of tax received for a particular month at the specific month’s end will render better accounting position for the GST collections. The March collection of Central GST (C-GST) and State GST (S-GST) would be reflected in April data which would be made public on May 1. The move, it is hoped, will ease computing of government revenues.
The current practice of reporting employed under country’s new tax law GST allows taxpayers to file their monthly tax returns by the 20th of the following month. The revenues collected are reported on 26th. This leads to a month-long delay between collections and their reporting. And by the end of the first GST fiscal year (eight months/July-February ), the total reported tax revenue would have been a month less.
Keeping the above dodgy fiscal situation in mind, the Finance ministry has decided that GST collections for the month of April will be reported on a real-time basis on May 1. By the end of the current week, Taxpayers must have completed reporting of their GST returns for the last month i.e March. But as per the guidelines of the Finance Ministry, taxpayers need to report only Integrated-GST (if any). IGST is levied on inter-state movement of goods as well as imports. The March Tax collection will reflect only the Integrated-GST. The I-GST revenue for the month of March is around Rs 20,000 crore. As per reports, the Finance Ministry will soon release month-wise GST collection data for the entire 2017-18 fiscal year. However, the GST revenue for the month of March will only take into account the revenues from IGST.
The April data which would be publicly released on May 1 as per the new reporting procedure under GST will witness a spike as it would subsume IGST collections for the same month, and CGST and SGST collections for March. However post GST revenue reporting for the month of April, the monthly collections of CGST, IGST, and SGST for each month of the current Fiscal Year (including May) would be reported on the 1st working day of the subsequent month. The GST proceeds would stabilize from the second month (May) onwards.
Taxpayers as part of the prevailing practice are supposed to file GSTR-3B returns for a given month by the 20th day of the subsequent month. This is however pegged to change from April onwards. As per data released by the tax department, GST collection for January was Rs 86,318 crore which declined to 85,174 crores in February.
