Migration of traders to GST sluggish

Dated 14th December, 2016

Despite Puducherry being the first State in the country to launch the Goods and Service Tax Network (GSTN) portal, the migration of traders and merchants registered under various State and Central tax regimes to the GST remains slow.

The portal was launched on November 8 to facilitate the migration of traders registered under Value Added Tax (VAT), Service Tax and Central Excise to GST.

According to K. Sridhar, Deputy Commissioner of Commercial Taxes, as many as 15,000 traders in the Union Territory are currently registered with VAT and other tax regimes such as Central Excise. Of them, about 3,000 have enrolled themselves with the GST.

The Commercial Taxes Department has also started validation of PAN data of the dealers and has communicated the provisional ID and password for GST migration. Traders who have enrolled themselves with the portal have been allotted a GSTN number. The Commercial Taxes Department will soon be enabling Aadhaar based e-signature to digitally sign documents on the GST portal, he said.

After the launch of the GST portal, the Department organised special camps at all the seven divisions in the UT for registration. However, merchants are yet to come forward to migrate from the present tax regime to the GST. Sources on condition of anonymity said that the enrolment process was slow across the country, except for Gujarat, which has registered a good response so far. Traders are not coming forward as they are unsure about the legal status of the GST. The delay may also be due to the transition time as April 1, 2016 is the date of implementation of GST.

Mr. Sridhar said the special camp at the Commercial Taxes Department will continue till December 15. The department will also be holding a special camp in association with the Puducherry Traders Federation this week to help traders get enrolled in the new tax regime.