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GSTN ready to press ENTER button for GST rollout

Senior executives of the IT backbone firm for the new unified indirect tax say their system was robust enough to ensure a non-turbulent take-off

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On the eve of the rollout of new unified tax regime – Goods and Services Tax (GST) – among many trepidations, there is one on how the information technology (IT) platform will sustain it.

Prakash Kumar, CEO, GST Network (GSTN), dismisses any such fears saying the IT sector had left no stone unturned for the smooth launch of the GST from July 1.

According to him, the IT backbone for the new single indirect levy has been designed keeping in mind the huge current requirement as well as future needs of taxpayers.

Kumar said their system was capable of handling three times the invoices that may be uploaded on the portal.

"So, we had kept in mind 80 lakh taxpayers who would be filing returns, at an average of 400 invoices per taxpayer. And these 400 invoices are only for business to business (B2B) and not for business to consumer (B2C), which is not to be filed. For this, we had collected data from nine states which take invoice data today and as per that it was only 127 invoices per taxpayer. So, we have increased our capability by three times on our system for any unforeseen events," he said.

Based on the return filing pattern observed in India, the GSTN has been designed assuming that 50 per cent of the people would file returns on the last day.

The GST senior executive also feels there was a big deal being made about the transaction traffic on GSTN when currently there were IT systems of National Stock Exchange, Income Tax (I-T) department and others, which were handling more traffic than them and operating without a glitch.

"This (GSTN) is not something which is unprecedented. National Stock Exchange gets more number of transactions than any other system in the country. Lakhs of shareholders and brokers operate on their system and there the transactions have go through in a fraction of a second. Income Tax (I-T) department's tax-base is much larger than us. It handles almost five crore taxpayers' data. It's done annually but it is filed at the same time. We have taken lessons from all these people," he said.

It is expected that around 300 crore invoice data will be uploaded on the GST portal every month and over 68 lakh taxpayers have registered on it till now.

Kumar said a beta test was done on 3,200 actual users to assess the "functionality and user experience" on the network and fine-tune it based on the feedback received.

"It is an additional test (beta test) we did to get user experience feedback and then make the required changes and move ahead," he said.

In this pilot launch, it was found that the offline tool didn't work on systems which were more than 12 years old.

"It came as a surprise to us that there are still people who are using 12-year-old computers. Generally, people discard systems after 5-6 years. In offices, it is discarded after three years but there are people who have systems more than 10 years old. So, we had to make changes so that our offline tool worked even on the old systems," said Kumar.

Navin Kumar, chairman, GSTN, also said the fact that over 1.6 lakh new users have already filed application on the portal showed that their system was working well.

"Of course, people will have some problems. Then, they will go to the help desk and take assistance... I don't see any issue," he said.

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