In a bid to tackle the tax evasion among the businesses, the Government is planning to integrate GST returns to the E-way Bills, ET reported.
While the full-fledged implementation is starting from 1st July 2019, the pilot run is set to begin in April 2019. While the e-way bill site has seen significant developments in terms of the user interface since its inception, the GST authority has noticed that it is a right time to start integrating the same with GST portal, the report said.
With the integration of e-way bills with the returns, the department is planning to disallow taxpayers from using the e-way bill site from generating e-way bills when they default in filing of GST Returns for two periods consecutively.
This would apply when either of GSTR-3B or GSTR-4, whichever applicable, is not filed. It has been observed that most of the taxpayers generating e-way bills belong to the class of taxpayers contributing the most to the GST collections.
The move aims at boosting the GST revenue impact since sufficient time has lapsed in making sufficient e-way bill data available, which can now be analyzed and gaps can be identified.
As the date of implementation of the new system is yet to be announced, the validation on the portal is being worked on. Another plan of action which has just seen a start is the invoice data transfer from the e-way bill portal to the GST portal for the filing of GSTR-1.
The two-fold objectives of the system are, to make the users feel accommodative of the ease in data handling and achieving accuracy and to allow real-time monitoring of the transactions to keep an eye on the cases of tax evasion.
The facility for importing e-way bill data for preparing GSTR-1 is already up and running on the GST portal login. It allows importing only those invoices against which e-way bills were generated during the tax period. This serves as an alternative mode of data ingestion apart from the existing methods like excel, JSON or API Integration.
