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 declaration for large taxpayers (20th day of the following month)
2. NIL quarterly returns and facility to submit quarterly returns by SMS.
3. Small taxpayers (turnover less than Rs 5 million) will be required to file quarterly returns, although payments will be made monthly.
4. Continuous upload of invoices and ease of viewing
5. Self-admitted responsibility in case of return not presented through the loaded invoices.
6. Unidirectional flow of documents to claim the borne tax credit
7. Missing bill report with interest and penalty after 2 tax periods
8. IT Offline Tool in Excel Along with Filtering Feature
9. There will be no automatic reversal of the credit and recovery of the income tax through due process.
10. Invoice blocking indicating acceptance of entry 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. Modification of the return to address human errors
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 loading shipping invoice in case of exports
22. Transmission of data to ICEGATE
23. Enter the tax credit based on the self-declaration until the data is transmitted from ICEGATE to SEZ online
24. Provider-side control in the best interest of the recipient
25. Profile based return to show you only some types of supplies to report based on your profile
26. Purchase information in the annual declaration
27. Suspension of registration in case the registered person requests cancellation of 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 legal action. A questionnaire would be available to taxpayers to verify eligibility to opt-in for quarterly filing and to enable profile-based returns. The drafted statements were made available online and will be available once they are approved.
Taxpayers have to wait and see how this simplification 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 the invoices corresponding to attributed sales will be treated in the returns.