Note on the Draft Simplified GST Declarations Approved by the GST Board

GST tip has approved the GST refund design at its 27th meeting, however the key features and drafted formats were approved at its 28th meeting. The main characteristics of these monthly returns would be:

1. Single monthly return for large taxpayers (20th day of the following month)

2. NIL quarterly declarations and ease of submitting quarterly declarations by SMS.

3. Small taxpayers (turnover less than Rs 5 crore) will be required to file quarterly returns, although payments will be made on a monthly basis.

4. Continuous bill uploading and ease of viewing

5. Self-admitted responsibility in case of return not presented through the charged invoices.

6. One-way flow of documents to claim the supported tax credit

7. Missing Bill Report with Interest and Penalty after 2 Tax Periods

8. Offline IT Tool in Excel Along with Filtering Feature

9. There will be no automatic reversal of the credit and recovery of the entrance tax through due process.

10. Blocking of invoices indicating acceptance of income of the reported transaction.

11. Rejection of Invoices by the taxpayer in case the recipient erroneously mentions the GSTIN

12. Pending and modified invoices

13. Presumed blocking and Unblocking of invoices

14. Capture of HSN up to 4 or more digits in regular return

15. Two main tables in the declaration: one to report the supplies and another to make use of the input tax credit.

16. Payment of multiple liabilities

17. Return Modification to Address Human Error

18. Modification of missing invoices and other details

19. Liability payment arose due to amendment and higher late fee for return of amendment

20. Ease of evaluation and monthly accounting in the common portal

21. Ease of uploading shipping invoice in case of exports

22. Transmission of data to ICEGATE

23. Enter tax credit based on self-declaration until data is transmitted from ICEGATE to SEZ online

24. Provider-side control in the best interest of the recipient

25. Return based on profile to show you only a few types of supplies to report based on your profile

26. Information on purchases in the annual declaration

27. Suspension of the registration in case the registered person requests the cancellation of the registration

28. Sahaj (B2C external supplies) and Sugam returns (B2B + B2C external supplies)

This simplification of GST returns would benefit by reducing compliance costs for taxpayers. Minor or clerical errors would not give rise to the initiation of legal action. A questionnaire would be available to taxpayers to verify eligibility to opt out of quarterly filing and enable profile-based returns. The redacted statements have been made available online and will be available once they are approved.

Taxpayers have to wait and see how this streamlining process will help them. I hope it doesn’t make the presentation more cumbersome as the GSTN is tuned to handle volumes of data and the network experienced frequent failures. Ending the note with several questions in mind about how invoices corresponding to attributed sales will be treated in returns.