The information technology (IT) infrastructure and services company Goods and Services Tax Network’s (GSTN) average billing to the central and state governments is around Rs 50-70 per head per month, said Navin Kumar, who heads the non-governmental IT systems firm.
This is the user charge for the GSTN portal by taxpayers for registration, filing returns, paying taxes, refund and other services, which the government will bear on behalf of the taxpayers.
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“The proposal that we had given earlier was Rs 50 per month per taxpayer. It was in slab, where for smaller taxpayers it was Rs 50 while for those in higher slab it was around Rs 5,000 but on an average it came to about Rs 50-70 per head per month. It is basically a cost-plus formula because all the expenses that we are incurring that is what we are charging,” said Kumar.
GSTN had proposed a user-fee to be recovered from the every taxpayer but that was struck down by the empowered committee of state finance ministers as until now it was the respective tax department of central and state governments that have been bearing the cost.
“We had said that the government should allow us to charge the taxpayers and whoever uses the system. But they (empowered committee of state finance ministers) said that until now the taxpayers were not required to pay any fee for filing returns, so that will not be fair and so we (government) will pay. They have decided a formula for that and we will raise advance six-month bill and they will pay,” said Kumar.
The GSTN has already presented a bill of about Rs 275 crore. The deadline for payment was March 1.
“We have raised a bill of Rs 275 crore. Till now, 75% of the states have paid, the Government of India is also working on it. The deadline was March 1, by then only 12 states had paid. After that we have been chasing them. So, out of 29 states, the number has gone up to 16 -17 states. The rest are working on it. But we will manage. We have the working capital loans that we will use,” said the GSTN chief.
The IT system developed by GSTN has a portal which is the front end, where the taxpayers will register, pay taxes, file returns and avail of other such services. This front end of the system is linked to Centre’s and states’ tax departments, which is its back-end.
According to Kumar, GSTN will be creating and maintaining the backend system of 25 states and two Union Territories (UTs).
He said up till now, out of 85 lakh registered taxpayers, around 55 lakh have activated their accounts on the GSTN portal and have been given provisional identification (ID) numbers and once all the GST laws are notified by the government then these ID numbers will become the GST ID numbers (GSTINs).
DNA India, New Delhi 11 April 2017
