Amit Mitra, West Bengal Finance Minister, has communicated through a letter to Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley requesting him to organise an urgent meeting of the GST officials to solve the problems being faced by small taxpayers, especially the problems relating to the technology or IT network.
Mitra, in a letter sent by him to Mr Jaitley, also repeated his demand for a white paper describing the current state of GST implementation in the country, its shortcomings, etc. “You will also recall my repeated request to provide a white paper on the state of preparedness, also containing the shortfalls on different elements of the complex GST system being envisioned, once again to no avail,” said Mitra.
The last date for filing the first tax returns and making the payment under the new regime, which was 20th August originally, has been extended by the Government to August 25. Some reports suggest that technical glitches were faced by several taxpayers while filing their returns on the GST portal. On Saturday, the network had been loaded with heavy rush of return filers. Several stakeholders including businesses, traders and taxpayers were not able to log in and access the GSTN portal. The officials of GSTN, in response, stated that they were working to resolve the problem. The officials also mentioned that it was not a problem related to the capacity of the system.
Mitra stated in his letter, “Apart from access to the GSTN itself, problems were reported regarding payment through banks. The RBI gateway failed at times. Banks refused to receive over-the-counter challans in many places and the troubles of small taxpayers knew no end.”
He added that the system will get more than 1.5 crore hits around the 20th of the next month, and the continued failure of the system may lead to ‘major pains’ for businesses, especially for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The Finance Minister of West Bengal said, “Therefore, I have serious reservations whether the system is prepared for this. We saw the registration module which took over 20-25 days to stabilise and even now features like appeal, restoration of application form etc are not in place.”
Mitra said that issues such as the cancellation of applications, registration of GST professionals and amendments have not been resolved yet by the Council. He added that the taxpayers with an annual turnover of below Rs. 20 lakh, who migrated from the previous regime (VAT), were still unable to cancel their registration on the portal and now they are being liable to pay their returns.
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“The module for carrying over old credit is being activated today as per information available, and the last date for returns is 28th in such cases. I have serious doubts on whether this entire process can be streamlined in such a short span of time. Once again, the problems of today in the implementation of GST, may get exacerbated”, said Mitra.
