Published On : Thu, Aug 31st, 2017

CAIT demands waiver of penalty under GST

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CAIT and GST
Nagpur: The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) has called upon the Government to waive off penalty being charged on late filing of GSTR Form 3B which is summary return for the month of July.

CAIT President B.C.Bhartia & Secretary General Praveen Khandelwal said that assuming such scenario; the Finance Minister had announced taking lenient view for procedural lapses in initial months of implementation of GST.

It is creditable that in the first month of its implementation, GST has fetched revenue of about Rs. 93 thousand crores of rupees with about 65% business entities registered with GSTN portal. Though last date of filing GSTR Form 3B designed to furnish summary returns of transactions made in the month of July has already expired on 28th August but it is expected that remaining lot will file the return after paying penalty of Rs.100 per day with a maximum penalty limit of Rs.5,000 only-said the trade leaders.

The increase in GST revenue shows that traders across Country have adopted GST even though there are lot many technical glitches with GSTN portal and this could be one of the reasons for non-filing of July summary return by majority of remaining people.

In view of the same, the CAIT has urged Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to waive off the penalty at lease for July and August GST returns. Any penalty clause at this point of time will be counter-productive to GST adoption among trading community.

However, the recent experience of the traders with GSTN portal with regard to filing of GST Form 3B was not at all good and landed traders across Country in great trouble even for accessing the portal. The CAIT has asked the Government to ensure smooth functioning of GSTN portal at least to the extent that there should not be any login issue and to ensure that the portal works in a cohesive manner providing ease to Traders in complying with their tax compliance timely.

It is important to note that only a small section of about 80 lakh business entities registered with GSTN were trying to use the portal for filing very limited data, which was either inaccessible or showing errors or could not get the Form or Challan downloaded, keep the traders in a fix. In month of September, the portal has to take care of more than 3 billion vouchers which is certainly a gigantic task since each traders has to upload Invoice wise details on the basis of which the portal will prepare purchase statement of each entity which will be verified by the traders and thereupon tax liability will be derived after adjusting input credit.In case the system do not respond as happened last week, the entire GST eco system will come to a halt. Therefore, keeping in view of the crucial aspect of the issue, the Government must come forward to conducting a technology audit of GSTN portal.