With a slew of reported glitches in the Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN, the ministerial panel on the subject will meet on 16th September 2017 in Bengaluru to examine the information technology (IT) challenges plaguing the uniform tax regime.
The committee, chaired by Sushil Modi, deputy chief minister and finance minister of Bihar, was constituted earlier this week. It was a sequel to the GST Council’s decision last week at Hyderabad, to oversee technical and operational issues pertaining to the IT infrastructure.
GSTN will give a presentation to the ministers of the work done, challenges and the strategy. The meeting will be attended by its officials and those of IT major Infosys.
The committee was constituted in the wake of complaints from businesses about the glitches in GSTN. Simultaneously, the timeline for filing of returns was extended. The system had crashed on September 8, two days before the earlier deadline to file detailed sales returns, after a flood of entities tried uploading of invoices. Close to 750,000 returns were filed on 9th September, just before the due date was extended to October 10.
Officials in the government argue that businesses deferring return filing till the last day is also a factor for the panic.
About 2.8 million GSTR-1 or detailed sales returns were filed by 9th September, the earlier deadline. This is about half the expected returns for the month of July. However, traffic on the GSTN portal declined significantly from 80,000 users an hour to 17,000 an hour after finance minister Arun Jaitley announced the extension.