For a country that takes pride in its IT edge, the glitches, it faces in the roll-out of the goods and services tax is a strange impasse. Analyse.
Refer - The Hindu
IAS Parliament 7 years
KEY POINTS
· The information technology industry has emerged as one of the fastest growing industries in India.
GSTN
· GSTN is a not-for-profit company set up to provide IT infrastructure and services to the Centre and States, tax payers and other stakeholders for implementing the GST.
· To enable capture, processing and exchange of information among the stakeholders.
Issue
· GST portal crashed due to heavy traffic.
· So the government has extended the deadline to file Goods and Service Tax (GST) return.
· This is the second time that the GST portal faced glitches and forced government to extend the deadline for filing of returns.
· Exporters have cited their refunds under GST getting stuck due to extension of deadline, causing a crunch in capital to buy raw materials.
Glitches in GSTN
· Overloading of the GSTN slows down the portal and delays payment.
· Payments not getting reflected in challans.
· Summary showing details different from the uploaded details.
· Data security breach. (Showing error reports of some other taxpayer)
· More-than-expected time in generation of error reports while filing GST returns, sometimes as much as 24 hours.
· E-mails sent to the GSTN top brass did not elicit any response.
Way Forward
· GOI formed a five member Group of Ministers (GoM)
a) To look into issues hampers GSTN portal.
b) To restructure portal to make it robust.
· GoM has to work in tandem with Infosys, the IT supporter of GSTN to solve the immediate crisis.
· GoM has to gather all stakeholders’ feedback and eradicate all possible hiccups in future.
Earlier, the government at least allowed both manual and online filing of GST returns, but now since only online system is there, a lot has to done to make it user friendly and glitches free.
