The government proposes to roll out compulsory e-invoicing of Goods and Service (GST) from October 1, 2020, which was revealed by GST Network (GSTN) CEO Prakash Kumar.
However, it has decided to raise the threshold to exempt smaller entities from this compliance, an official said on Thursday.
E-invoicing is a step towards improving ease of doing business and reporting for GST. Manual data entry leads to transcription errors and wrong entries.
Accordingly, e-invoicing will be mandatory only for businesses with turnover of Rs 500 crore or more. Those, on the other side of the threshold, will be exempted from the compliance burden, for the time being.
The threshold for mandatory e-invoicing, a step to improve tax compliance, was earlier planned to be kept at Rs.100 crore. But, the changes are now being made on the recommendations of an empowered panel of the GST Council.
The GST implementation committee, that takes decisions on behalf of the Council when urgent steps are needed, recommended on Wednesday that the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) can keep October 1 as the date for implementing e-invoicing but with a higher threshold, said Principal Commissioner, GST Policy, Yogendra Garg.
“The QR codes are definitely not happening on October 1 but the e-invoice scheme and 500 crore turnover related notification should be out by next week and the industry can start working on it as everything is ready,” he said at an ASSOCHAM e-Conclave on 3 years of GST.
Kumar also said the GSTN, the IT backbone of the indirect tax system, will, from November, auto-populate the GSTR-3B returns of taxpayers.
“The aim is, from November month returns filed in December, GSTR-3B will be auto-populated. First, we are doing this for monthly tax filers. The entire tax-paying community will be covered after that,” he explained.
The GSTN recently started to generate GSTR-3B based on the GSTR-1 filed, Kumar said, adding that for two months PDF documents would be given to taxpayers so that people can check and inform the authorities of any error in the process or computation of tax or the ITC.
