GST Portal Is Now Live; Migration Of 65 Lakh VAT Payers, 20 Lakh Service Tax Payers Started!

By Mohul Ghosh On Nov 11, 2016

GSTN, the company which is building the massive IT infrastructure for Goods and Services Tax regime in India has silently released the mega-portal for GST. Interestingly, the website was made live on the same day when PM Modi announced the banning of Rs 500, Rs 1000 currency notes in the country.

The portal, which can be accessed at https://www.gst.gov.in/, will now enable the execution of ‘One Market, One Rate’ tax model, pan-India.

In fact, migration of 65 lakh VAT payers, 20 lakh service taxpayers and 3-4 lakh central excise taxpayers into the new GST regime has already started.

GSTN is importing high-end hardware for finishing the IT infrastructure of GST regime, and 4 data-centers would be established in New Delhi and Bengaluru to ensure that the data is safe, secured.

Interestingly, tax-threshold under GST has been set as Rs 20 lakh; and presently, the threshold for service tax payers is Rs10 lakh, excise tax payers is Rs1.5 crore, and between Rs 5 lakh and Rs 10 lakh for value added tax assessees.

Hence, it is being speculated that several small-scale traders can go out of tax-net under GST.

What Will The Website Do?

As per GSTN Chairman Navin Kumar, this GST mega-portal will be a single window for crores of taxpayers, wherein they can easily and smoothly pay all their tax dues, which was earlier paid across various heads and spectrums.

Thus, traders, merchants and businessmen can now pay their monthly/yearly excise duty, service tax, VAT and all other types of direct/indirect taxes using this portal using debit/credit card and NEFT/RTGS protocols.

Besides enabling single window online payment of taxes, the portal will also enable IT backbone required for registering new businesses, filing returns and getting refunds back.

As of now, around 60% of the software required for running GST structure across the country is already ready, and work in currently on to complete the remaining work. The website is now testing the integration of various state and central taxes on goods and services, which will make a uniform tax structure pan-India before April, 2017 when GST is formally implemented.

GSTN Chairman Navin Kumar said, ‘’Because we started work in November 2015, today we are in a happy position that 60 per cent of the software development has been completed; 40 per cent is balance and that work is going on,”

As per available information, a new PAN card based provisional ID would be created for 80 lakh taxpayers by January 31, 2017. It would be called GST ID, and would be 15-digit long. This ID would be generated once Parliament passes one last legislation related with GST.

Another set of reports says that migration of 80 lakh taxpayers has been started from Puducherry and Sikkim, and would be phase-wise completed for all the states.

We will keep you updated as more information comes in..

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