GST; What Changes would make it work

After several red flags in the way the GSTN functions, finally the Officials from the finance ministry have indicated that indeed these issues are being reviewed at the highest level.

As a Chartered Accountant with my experience from Fortune 500 company wherein the end users were all highly qualified people, the systems need to be simple. In case of GSTN, the system was pretty simple in paper. However when we got to use it, the complications came out. The system is highly illogical or rather not tweaked to match the practical requirements of the stakeholders. Be it the registration or the backend access to the tax department officials.

Changes that would make the system workable.

1. No Matching of Invoices.

Currently the buyer and the seller has to match the sales and purchases. Though a very simple process it is highly resource consuming. Just imagine a single paise difference in invoice will lead to manually matching the invoice with at least 2-3 minutes of time being spent. However had there been 100's of purchases then certainly it is giving a lot of trouble. Most of the returns had been submitted by simply accepting all the invoices submitted by the sellers without verifying much.

May after finding such things, the Ministry proactively extended the due dates for filing the GSTR2 Returns since there will be big hue and cry later once people understand the issues raising out of it.

It would be better if the seller uploads the total sales each of the GSTN's and not each invoice details. In case of major tax payers the customers will be repetitive and not unique for each month.

2. Do not mislead with Quarterly Return

There is a proposal that all dealers who are having turnover less than 2 crore to file their returns Quarterly. If that being the case how the buyer will get the Input Credit will be  a big question mark.  Irrespective of the fact that the return needs to be submitted quarterly, the dealer has to file his GSTR3B on monthly basis. Thus leading to more headaches. With the way we have been filing the returns, it would take another year for stabilizing.

Lets hope for the best coming out the meeting beginning today. True that there are a lot of issues arising out of GST, but since we do not have a better system, its better to follow it.

Known Devil is better than an unknown angel!

Anbudan,

CA Thangavel M

Twitter @CAThangavelM