The GST collection of the government maintained its momentum this fiscal year despite Covid disruption as a pickup in economic recovery is shoring up corporate earnings.
The gross GST revenue collected in the month of October 2021 stood at Rs 1,30,127 crore, which is a growth of 24 per cent over the GST revenues in the same month last year and 36 per cent over 2019-20.
The revenue for October is also the second highest ever since introduction of GST, second only to that in April 2021, which is related to year-end revenues.
This is very much in line with the trend in economic recovery. This is also evident from the trend in the e-way bills generated every month since the second wave, a finance ministry statement said.
According to the statement, of the total October GST collection, CGST is Rs 23,861 crore, SGST is Rs 30,421 crore, IGST is Rs 67,361 crore (including Rs 32,998 crore collected on import of goods) and Cess is Rs 8,484 crore (including Rs 699 crore collected on import of goods).
The government has settled Rs 27,310 crore to CGST and Rs 22,394 crore to SGST from IGST as regular settlement. The total revenue of Centre and the States after regular settlements in the month of October 2021 is Rs 51,171 crore for CGST and Ts 52,815 crore for the SGST.
During the month, revenues from import of goods was 39 per cent higher and the revenues from domestic transaction (including import of services) are 19 per cent higher than the revenues from these sources during the same month last year.
The revenues would have still been higher if the sales of cars and other products had not been affected on account of disruption in supply of semi-conductors, the finance ministry said.
The revenues have also been aided due to the efforts of the State and Central tax administration resulting in increased compliance over previous months, the ministry added.
In addition to action against individual tax evaders, this has been a result of the multipronged approach followed by the GST Council. On the one hand, various measures have been taken to ease compliance like nil filing through SMS, enabling Quarterly Return Monthly Payment (QRMP) system and auto-population of return. During the past one year, GSTN has augmented the system capacity considerably to improve user experience.
On the other hand, the Council has also taken various steps to discourage non-compliant behaviour, like blocking of e-way bills for non-filing of returns, system-based suspension of registration of taxpayers who have failed to file six returns in a row and blocking of credit for return defaulters.
The number of returns (GSTR-3B) of every month/quarter by the end of next month is a good parameter indicating timely payment of returns and filing of returns. After the last date of filing of returns, special efforts are undertaken to ensure compliance by the end of the month in form of messaging by GSTN and close follow up by the Centre and State tax administration.
This has also been aided by the fact that at various occasions, the Council decided to waive late fee allowing people to file old returns and come up-to-date in filing of returns. With more and more taxpayers filing the returns every month, the percentage of returns of old period filed in any month has been increasing continuously.
About 1.5 crore returns were filed in the month of July 2021 as taxpayers filed returns of past months taking benefit of the relaxation given due to Covid.
With improvement in return filing, the focus of the GST Council has been on timely filing of GSTR-1, the statement containing details of invoices. This statement is critical to ensure discipline in taking input tax credit. Various steps have been taken to ensure timely filing of GSTR-1.
Overall, the impact of these efforts has ensured increased compliance and higher revenues. As a part of overall efforts to plug evasion, more steps to restrict fake ITC are under consideration of the GST Council, the ministry statement said.
