GSTN CEO Prakash Kumar Views Over GST E Way Bill Re-launch

The Goods and Services Network which plays an important role as GST IT backbone was established on 28 March 2013. On completing five years, Prakash Kumar, chief executive officer mentions the challenges, technological glitches, and criticism faced by the GSTN throughout. A successful implementation of GST to E-way bill from April 1, all the responsibilities are handled by the network. Here is the questionnaire of CEO regarding the GSTN during an interview. The question has been answered by the CEO, Prakash Kumar.

Q. GSTN’s ownership structure is a private sector entity and people have a concern with it as well?

• It is not an issue. As GSTN can hire people with technical expertise at market wages. We follow the expertise and neutrality in handling such big information projects.

Q. What are the lessons?

• As software development process requires time in implementation and development process, but they do not have much time for GST implementation. As they have pressure to bring in GST before September 2017.
• The GST laws were meant to brought earlier, but states and centre have taken time to forsake their taxation rights. Therefore, the time-duration was expected.

Q. Is the data safe with GSTN network?

• None of the team can access any individual information. The data is disclosed only between two people the taxpayer and the tax officer who has power over the taxpayer. The database is encrypted and fed in a collective manner.

Q. What challenges has GSTN faced in implementing GST?

• It was hard as initial years were spent in hiring. We hired Infosys in 2015 but started working after the draft GST law out in June 2016. Later, in March 2017, the laws were amended in a big manner and made us for a big setback. The forms for registration and return forms were updated and released in a phased manner.

Q. The GST council is about to amend the return forms again, do you think it will be easy going this time?

• We have requested to give proper time in development, test and available the form. With this, it will be easy for taxpayers to feed the form correctly without any surprises. The process requires time to make changes for the GSPs, the accountant software companies, and the taxpayers as well.

Q. Are you ready for GST e-way bill implementation?

• A lot of changes has been made to the system after the failure at the first time launch. Now, NIC (National Informatics Centre) has updated the infrastructure. The system is tested as well to count the number of e-way bills can be generated through the system. The system can generate 75 lakh e-way bills daily instead of 26 lakh limit. We have planned to start an inter-state e-way bill from 1 April and switch to intra-state after that. The intra-state volumes estimate is not easy, so a staggered implementation for intra-state only taking 4-5 states in a single go.

Source: https://www.livemint.com