GSTN IT Platform Still Under Maintenance

The Central government is forcing to implement Goods and Service Tax (GST) from 1st July but there is always something which stops its way. Under the new GST Regime, GSTN is one of the IT platforms which helps to perform any kind of GST activities which was developed by the mutual concern of Government and Private IT company. State Government, as well as several stakeholders, was disappointed with the readiness of IT platform as it seems that it is still under development phase.

In the last GST Council Meeting which was held on 3rd June, GSTN executives and officials have presented the detailed documentation in front of council members which includes IT preparedness and the amount of work done by them. GST Council Members has asked many queries, problems, and issues related to the IT readiness. However GSTN authorities have shown support and confidence in the matter and assured that they are ready for the work assigned, but eventually, not everyone was fully satisfied.

After the completion of GST Council Meeting, West Bengal Finance Minister, Amit Mitra said that he was not happy with GSTN formulation and the fact is that nearly a vast number equivalent to three billion invoices would be uploaded on Government IT portal every month which may cross the handling capacity. Mitra said that “ They have done trial runs on only 100-200 companies and even during that trial runs, many challenges were faced in uploading invoices.”

He further added that IT network has provided permission to only 34 GST Suvidha Providers (GSPs). Through GSP, generally small traders and companies will be helped to upload data on IT network. Mitra said that “Given the millions of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) in the country, many of which would come under the tax net for the first time, 34 GSPs is a very small number, to begin with. “

CEO of GSTN, Prakash Kumar, has a totally different opinion in the preparation of IT network, he was very confident and said that GSTN would be fully ready for the implementation of GST from 1st July. He further added that IT platform has already done the trial in the month of May along with 3,200 taxpayers across the nation and at that time, some minor issues were faced by the users and the IT platform has already solved their issues.

Kumar said that “We had given an offline tool, which did not work on older 32-bit computers. We had to take care of that so that it worked on machines which were 4-5 years old.”

Excel sheet was another issue that faced by the users at GSTN portal as “In Excel, where an 8-digit date — 01/04/2017 — was getting converted to 1/4/2017 and the system would not accept a 6-digit date. So that was a problem which we have fixed,” says Kumar. Some other minor changes which include placement of icons and so on, which they had already applied.

The purpose of beta testing doesn’t mean that we were checking the load of the systems but to solve the functional problems. GSTN CEO said that “We have a different test for the load, where we simulate the same size or quantity of load hitting the system. That is done separately and that is called stress testing.”

While answering on the issue of GSPs, Kumar said that they had had already obtained more than 160 applications for GSPs. Approval of new GSPs is now possible after the implementation of GST i.e., 1st July. However, Prakash Kumar said that 62 lakh taxpayers from a total of 80 lakh and existing tax holders VAT, service tax and central duty have registered at GSTN portal. Kumar said that GSTN IT platform can handle the load of 50,000 queries posted per second at a time.

The people logged into the system may vary from the people hitting the system at a single time. Might be 15 lakh or 10 lakh people logged into the system at a single time, but few of them operate commands in the system. GSTN platform can operate 50,000 commands in every second and this is not a small number.