Mumbai: Ever since the Uniform Goods and Services Tax (GST) system GST has been implemented in the country, it has remained complicated for traders. However, now when traders start understanding it, only the data from its portal has started disappearing.
This has created a new problem for businessmen and small entrepreneurs. The details of October 2018 are not visible on the GST portal. This is a big problem in filling new returns for those who have not downloaded and kept the old records. While the department officials are flabbergasting this new problem.
There is a huge problem in filing returns
Merchants say that data is being removed on the GST portal without any prior information. This is totally wrong. Due to this, we are facing a huge problem in filing returns. Every trader fills the returns by matching the old record. The traders who have kept all the old monthly records downloaded from the portal, they will not have any problem. But for traders who have not kept the data downloaded, a big problem has arisen in this corona period. Now how will they match the old record?
GST network arbitrary
Shankar Thakkar, the metropolitan president of the Confederation of All India Traders (CAT), the apex organization of traders, said that removing old data without any prior knowledge is absolutely wrong. If the data is to be removed, then its advance information should be given to all the traders registered on the portal. GST Network (GSTN), the organization that runs the GST portal, will be arbitrary in this way, so what will be the rationale for GST? The problem of having a portal hang on the last date is often a problem. Will you have to face this new mess now?
Extend GSTR-9 deadline
Thakkar said that changing the rules day by day and the misdeeds of the portal has made GST like an enigma. If this is the condition then people will start coming out of GST. When the data is showing zero on the portal, how can the merchant fill his return and penalty will also have to be paid after filling the last date. While there is no fault of that too, ‘Kat’ has attracted the attention of the department and GSTN to this problem through tweets and emails and has also sought to extend the deadline of GSTR-9 to 31 December 2020.
No helpline on the helpline
General Secretary of the Edible Oil Traders Federation Tarun Jain said that the GST portal is becoming a joke. Sometimes some data disappears from the portal. If you tell the local authorities, they get away with saying that ‘this is the error of the portal’, there is nothing we can do in this, you talk to the helpline and no ‘helpline’ is found on the helpline. Just a few days ago the data of July 2017 disappeared from the portal. Due to which, those traders who had not downloaded it were quite upset. It is now learned that there are many such traders, whose sales figures for the month of October 2018 are showing zero on the portal. Whereas, while depositing the returns of sales data GSTR-1 by the traders, all the data was filled and the PDF of which was downloaded, in which all the figures are visible.
