Suppliers have to register at GSTN: FinMin report
Dated 7th October, 2015
Suppliers have to mandatorily register at the Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN) portal to get the benefits from the country’s biggest tax reform, a finance ministry sub-committee said in a report on Wednesday.
The report comes a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi vowed to roll out GST from 2016. While Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has set April 2016 as the deadline, the political impasse in the Parliament has stalled the Constitutional (One Hundred Twenty Second Amendment) Bill or GST Bill in Rajya Sabha even though the Bill was passed in Lok Sabha last year.
On Wednesday, the joint committee on business processes for GST said suppliers have to register on state-wise basis and they will be allowed to hold multiple registration numbers for different verticals. States and the central government will migrate supplier data to common GST portal.
“A legal person without GST registration can neither collect GST from his customers nor claim any input tax credit of GST paid by him," it said.
However, there will be a threshold of Gross Annual Turnover including exports and exempted supplies (to be calculated on all-India basis) below which any person engaged in supply of Goods or Services or both will not be required to take registration, it said.
On the other side, merchants will be provided with GST identification numbers, it said.
Another report said that government will allow GST payment by suppliers via bank transfers, credit and debit cards, and over-the-counter.
The panel recommends RBI to act as aggregator of payment info for GST payments.
While there is apprehension over the roll out of GST from April 2016, the finance ministry is putting in place the framework for the new tax regime. The government has appointed Infosys to design and maintain the GST Network.
(This article is published in btvin.com on 7th Oct, 2015)