(FE)
Concerned over the stagnation in revenue flows, the GST Council on Saturday stuck to a plan to start the e-way bill mechanism for tracking inter-state movement of goods above a certain threshold from April 1, but for administrative feasibility, staggered its enforcement on intra-state transport over the next four weeks. The Council, however, could not reach a consensus on a revamped returns filing system that is at once simpler and militates against evasion, and, therefore, extended the current system where taxpayers practically file only the summary return GSTR-3B till June 30. As per an earlier plan, the GSTR-3B was to be replaced with comprehensive triplicate returns by April 1.
The group of ministers headed by Bihar deputy chief minister Sushil Modi and ‘IT experts’ will deliberate on how to simplify the returns filing system without compromising on its ability to check evasion and give a report in due course, finance minister Arun Jaitley said. These two are crucial anti-evasion measures—comprehensive returns filing and e-way bill— and have been hanging fire for long due to technical deficiencies, as well as industry’s complaints of high compliance burden. The Council also deferred implementation of other anti-evasion measures, such as reverse charge mechanism (RCM), provision for deduction of tax at source (TDS) and collection of tax at source (TCS) by another quarter, to June 30.
