Industry body Assocham has sought deferment of GST implementation from proposed July 1, stating that industry deserves more time and assistance to get prepared for implementation of this biggest ever tax reform undertaken by the country.
In a letter to the GST Council Chairman and Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, the Assocham Secretary General D.S. Rawat said that significant amount of work has been done on GST front, but there are various issues that need to be looked at before GST can be implemented successfully.
Assocham has said that going by the statements of CEO, GSTN, the GSTN will not be operational on July 1, 2017.It has been clearly stated by the CEO that the return module (which will facilitate filing of different returns before different prescribed dates) will be ready only by end-July, which will be before August, the month of filing returns. The important point to note here, according to Assocham, is that there will be no time left for dry run with the revised IT software on the Return module, a necessary requirement from the point of view of taxpayers.
Secondly, even the excel sheet , based on which taxpayers will have to upload invoices in the GSTN on a daily basis right from day one July 1, will be ready only on June 25 (going by GSTN Chairman's reported statement in media). Thus here also the taxpayers will not have the time of opportunity to have dry run on uploading of invoices as a part of the payment process.
This being the status of preparedness of the GSTN, the taxpayers would find it very difficult to comply with GST requirements from July 1, the chamber has said.
There are also few more concerns including the fact that a substantial number of assesses "remain unmigrated" to GST; system glitches during migration process raises questions as to the ability of the system to withstand huge traffic in GST and existing non-assesses who are liable to be registered under GST are prohibited from registering under GST.