With just a few days left for the roll out of India’s most awaited Indirect tax regime, the Cenral Govt proposing to postpone the implementation of the e-way bill as per which the movement of good above Rs 50,000 is required to be to pre-registered online. However, the states are unwilling to defer the provision.
Reportedly, the GST Council agreed to rope in National Informatics Centre (NIC) to work along with GST-Network to assess if an all India e-way bill system can be created in a short time-frame.
The GST Council had approved the draft bills which were released in April requires the on-line registration of any movement of goods, within or outside the state, having value of more than Rs 50,000 with the GST-Network (GSTN) website.
As per the draft rules, GSTN would generate e-way bills that will be valid for 1-15 days, depending on distance to be travelled — one day for 100 km and 15 days for more than 1,000 km transit. The tax officials can inspect the ‘e-way bill’ anytime during the transit to check tax evasion. The draft e-way bill rules also provide that the person in- charge of conveyance will be required to carry the invoice or bill of supply or delivery challan, and a copy of the e-way bill or the e-way bill number, either physically or mapped to a Radio Frequency Identification Device (RFID) embedded on to the conveyance. Physical verification of conveyances can be carried out on specific information of evasion of tax, as per the rules. The officer will be required to submit a summary report of every inspection of goods in transit within 24 hours and the final report within three days of inspection.
The rules authorise the tax commissioner or an officer empowered by him on his behalf to intercept any conveyance to verify the e-way bill or the number in physical form for all inter-state and intra-state movement of goods.
Sources said that at the June 3 meeting of the GST Council, the Centre contended that GSTN will be busy in the first three months of GST rollout as it has to ensure that technology backbone for the new indirect tax regime is working fine and hence would take about 6 months to build the platform for ‘e-way bill’.
The Centre also said that feedback from the industry was yet to be examined by the law committee and hence finalisation of rules would take sometime.
The GST Council then decided to defer a decision on the e-way bill system and entrusted the GSTN to check from the NIC whether they could develop a e-way bill system in a short time frame.
