Over 3.6 million businesses file GST returns

As many as 36,32,279 businesses filed their returns for the month of July till Monday morning under the goods and services tax (GST) regime. However, there were problems with the filing of forms required for claiming input tax credit for pre-GST stocks.

Those who have filed the returns constitute about 42 per cent of total number of assessees of 8.7 million under the GST regime. However, 2.2 million of these assessees are yet to complete the migration process. A last-minute rush had led to the GST Network portal, the information technology backbone of the new indirect tax system, crashing last week, forcing the government to postpone the tax filing deadline by five days to August 25.

Those who wish to claim transitional input tax credit could file returns by August 28. However, there were certain issues with TRAN-1 forms, needed for claiming transitional input tax credit. 

ClearTax Chief Executive Officer Archit Gupta said TRAN-1 was critical for those who wanted to take benefit of input credit on stocks lying with them from before the roll-out of the GST. Tran-1, he said, was currently being filed manually, making its submission prone to error. These forms cannot be revised if there was an error, he said. “In case lower input credit is claimed, it may be lost forever. Or, if a higher credit is claimed, it may invite strict penalty,” Gupta said. 

Pavan Peechara, CEO of Adaequare, an application service provider for the GST, said the problem people had with forms like TRAN-1 was that they had to provide the government with “lines and lines of data”. This can only be done through an upload, he said, adding that manual entries led to errors.