Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN), the company which was tasked to set up IT infrastructure for the GST, said that by January it will start training around 60,000 state government officials to equip them to handle GST roll out. The non-profit organisation said that the Centre agreed to pay around Rs 500 crore every year on behalf of the tax payers as service charge.
Speaking on the sidelines of SICCI’s interactive session in Chennai today, GSTN’s Chairman Navin Kumar said that GST won’t be successful without its IT backbone GSTN.
While on November 8, enrolment of VAT assessees to GST Portal started from Puducherry, the first in the country (along with Sikkim) on November 8, other States are expected to be covered before February 15, 2017.
All GST ID numbers will only be allocated once Parliament passes the supporting legislation for GST.
He noted, every month about 320 crore invoices are uploaded, initially GSTN suggested to the Government that users should be charged a small fee, but Government said that it will pay on behalf of the users. The burden would be around Rs 500 crore every year.
Enrollment programme is the beginning of the GST system, common GST Portal will be exposed to the public for the first time, existing taxpayers will get their GST account on Common GST Portal and seamless transition of existing taxpayers to GST provided they submit the required information on GST Portal, said Kumar.
He noted, today one of the major problems is a mismatch of the details of the tax payers and then the structure, fields. For example, VAT and service tax data are old and they are not updated, around 20 per cent of the people pan card is not there, or it is not correct or it is not matching. GSTN has approached the state governments and asked them to contact the taxpayers to get those details.
The GSTN awarded the contract to the second largest Indian tech major Infosys to develop software and work started based on draft business process document prepared by Officer’s Committee. The IT major was also asked to procure hardware.
While the data migration/collection has started and expected to be completed by beginning of 2017, hardware will be imported by end of this month and next month it will be tested and deployment of software licenses will also start. By January 2017, deployment of GST application and sanity testing would start, at the same time user acceptance testing will also be carried out followed by performance and security testing in Febuary, STQC testing (VAPT an Audit) in March 2017 and the system will go live on April 1, 2017.
According to Kumar, Infosys backed the order which is worth Rs 1,380 crore to run the front-end operations of the GST, involving the four basic business processes. The IT major will also manage the system for five years and storage of these data will be in Delhi, while the disaster recovery centre will be in Bangalore.
The GSTN was prepared to develop several of the back-end processes for the states since the Centre is supposedly equipped with its own back-end departmental IT support.
The GSTN in turn awarded the contract to the second largest Indian tech major Infosys for Rs 1,380 crore to run the front-end operations of the GST, involving the four basic business processes. The IT major will also manage the system for five years and storage of these data will be in Delhi, while the disaster recovery centre will be in Bangalore.
The GSTN was prepared to develop several of the back-end processes for the states since the Centre is supposedly equipped with its own back-end departmental IT support.
Business Standard, November 11
