In a move expected to bring cheers to taxpayers and cut down litigation related to indirect taxes, the Centre is mulling permitting taxpayers to file revised Goods and Services Tax (GST) returns, according to a report by The Economic Times (ET).
This provision is already accessible to those filing income tax. There is no facility for filing revised returns under GST at the current moment, except for minor corrections in the invoice details. Several groups and industry associations have raised the demand for this facility.
An official was quoted as saying that allowing updated returns under the GST regime will simplify the process of filing returns and cut litigation where the intent is not to evade tax and a taxpayer has either miscalculated or missed out on a detail.
The Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs is finalising the proposal’s details, which the GST Council law committee will then consider. The proposal will finally be forwarded to the GST Council. The provision may be initially launched for yearly returns and then expanded to bring quarterly ones under its ambit.
The GST network will need a major upgrade if the proposal gets approved. An official from GSTN told ET that the Centre will be able to implement the new facility by April 2025 if everything goes well.
ET quoted Saurabh Agarwal, tax partner, EY, as saying that GST return forms need the latest updates to keep up with changes in the fiscal landscape. This includes updating the annual return form to reflect the altered input tax credit reporting implemented in monthly returns.
MS Mani, tax partner at Deloitte, told ET that the data should be picked up and validated on a real-time basis. Businesses should be able to edit all fields in the auto-populated returns.
Tax officials have sent around 33,000 GST notices to businesses for discrepancies in returns filed and short payment of taxes in the 2017-18 and 2018-19 financial years.
On December 4, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the average gross monthly mop-up in the current financial year so far is Rs 1.66 trillion. The minister said in the Lok Sabha that the GST collection crossed the Rs 1.50 trillion mark in every month of the current fiscal and had touched a record high of Rs 1.87 trillion in April 2023.
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