Moneycontrol Launches Easybiz, Tool for MSMEs to Mitigate GST Compliance Issues

MSMEs, whether organised or unorganised makes an integral part of the economic ecosystem. Currently contributing 29 per cent to India’s GDP, government vision is to increase the MSME contribution to 50 per cent for the Indian economy to scale the $5 trillion mark. While, at it, the government reforms such as GST have replaced a slew of indirect taxes and aimed to reshape the Indian economy by reducing tax evasion and simplify tax compliance.

Since, the inception of Goods and Services Tax (GST), the major challenge, which has been highlighted by the MSME community, is the compliance of the reform and the complications attached with filing returns. Considering the difficulties faced by trade and industry in filing of returns, government has even introduce several measures to ease the process, however, MSME taxpayers still find it complicated.

The industry experts highlighted this issue as the major concern and setback for the growth of the small businesses and their operations.  Talking from the industry perspective, Anil Bhardwaj —Secretary-General, FISME, says, “Indian economy is witnessing a dichotomy. GDP is at the lowest level and the share market is at the historical peak. Keeping in mind the two major pain points which MSMEs counter, at least at the current level are the problems they face in GST filing and maintaining their GST accounts and second with regards to the receivables.” He states at the SME round table conference facilitated by Moneycontrol, laying impetus on how to help MSME bridge the gap between the MSME businesses and stakeholders.

However, compliance being the hiccup the government is continuously bringing out the measures to ease the complications and to rectify the faulty procedures. In a recent development, taking the note of difficulties and concerns expressed by the taxpayers regarding filing of GSTR-3B and other returns, the government came out with immediate measure. Presently the last date of filing GSTR-3B returns for every taxpayer is 20th of every month, but now GST taxpayers can file their GSTR-3B returns in a staggered manner. The dates have been divided accordingly on the basis of annual turnover of the taxpayers.

While in another observation, compliance of GST filings becomes cumbersome as taxpayers often practice the process on the very last day of the filing. This results into the technical glitches and leads to more complexities in the filing process. This is evident to the fact that on last of filing GSTR-3B returns i.e on 20th January 2020, out of total 65.65 lakh GSTR-3B filed for the tax month of December, 13.30 lakh GSTR-3B returns were filed on last day itself. As per the GST network, the returns filed on the last day were around one-fifth of the total returns despite technical glitches.