Businesses with More Than INR 500 Crore Turnover to Record GST e-Invoices from Oct

According to an official, the government is all set to introduce a GST (Goods and Services Tax) e-invoicing scheme for all the businesses having more than 500 crore turnover which will be generating all the invoices through a centralized portal of the government from 1st October 2020. The threshold for invoicing was previously set to 100 crore but after receiving numerous requests, the government shifted it to 500 crore.

The Principal Commissioner GST, Yogendra Garg, CBIC (Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs), said that with the introduction of all the schemes proposed in the new system, the GST return filing system will improve a lot. “Yesterday, the GST Implementation Committee has recommended that we will go ahead with the October 1 deadline (for e-invoice). To begin with, we will not do it for 100 crore and above, as we had notified. We will soon come out with a notification to make it 500 crore from October 1 and as they stabilize, we will bring a date for 100 crore turnover people,” Garg said at an Assocham event here. The new turnover threshold will be updated by the end of next week.

The benefit of the new e-invoicing will be two-fold, first, it will help in reducing tax evasion through fake invoices, second, it will make the return filing process easy for the assessees as the invoices will be recorded to a centralized portal. The government had announced in November 2019 that it will be introducing the GST e-invoicing system Get to know about the new E-invoice generation system on government GST portal with applicability. The system mandates to generate e-invoice for every sale by a registered business. Read more for the assessees having an annual turnover of more than 100 crore from 1st April 2020 but in March 2002, it changed the threshold to 500 crore and shifted the release date till 1st October 2020. 

The GST council also exempted the financial institutions like insurance, banks and other NBFCs (Non-Banking Financial Corporations) from issuing e-invoices. The new GST return filing system Get to know about the new E-invoice generation system on government GST portal with applicability. The system mandates to generate e-invoice for every sale by a registered business. Read more will also be launched between October 2020 and January 2020. Garg informed that in the previous 3 financial years, 100% returns have not been filed during a single month. Only 80% of assessees filed GST returns at most. “2019-20 has been a year of consolidation of compliance requirement… We took a call that instead of introducing the new return system which we had promised, we will carry out improvement in the existing return system and take it closer to what we had promised in the new return system to make the certainty of credit,” he said.

He also informed that the government is trying to set up a system that can ascertain the Input Tax Credit credits A complete guide for understanding the basics of input tax credit and it calculation with detailed examples under GST (Goods and Services Tax) India. Read more available to an assessee. “The endeavour is to make life simpler for the taxpayer. The vision for 4th year of GST is compliance burden gets reduced and e-invoice would help in this,” he said.

He said that the central officers have been training the state officers for the GST audits and some states have some good strategies that can be opted. “To the extent possible these are not going to be physical audits, these are more going to be desk audits,” he added.