With the start of new fiscal year 2018-19 for many business firms, the GST council has now decided to take effective measures that will make compliance easier for small businesses and traders. The council is going to organize its 26 th GST meet on 27 th Feb, 2018 in the capital.
The meeting is expected to help businesses get rid of filing tax returns related to purchases and an extensive return on all transactions. The businesses will rather be asked now to retain the summary return to be filed every month (GST return 3 B), the information on which will be expressed by invoices of sales uploaded. This information would be
adequate to give the benefit of tax credit to buyers, whose transactions will be reflected in the vendors returns.
Small and medium ventures and dealers have a great responsibility as they provide a big number of jobs in rural parts of India. As per the Ministry of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME), today there are more than 36 million such enterprises in the country which are employing over 80 million people and responsible for a one-third of
manufacturing output.
The GST has also planned to allow an increase in the extension in the transition period of about six to seven months to migrate to the new return filing system The Council has also plans to give two separate deadlines for small and medium enterprises, or SMEs, and large businesses for filing monthly returns.
The present deadline which is 20th of every month for filing returns and paying taxes of the previous month, has created hassles for the government as they are facing a delay of more than a fortnight in getting tax payments. So the idea is to allow large businesses pay taxes by 7th or 8th of every month and let SMEs continue with the present deadline of 20th of every month.
These changes would definitely reduce the load on the IT system and avoid now and then technical glitches. The government has a vision on stabilizing GST by moving to simpler compliance process and allow fewer ongoing changes.
The council also plans to give a fix date for the e-way bill, which is presently on hold and is planning to keep a higher threshold value of more than Rs50,000, for the electronic permit for goods movement under GST.
