'Designing GSTN Was Like Building A Ship While Its Sailing'

Although, it hasn’t been even an year since the GSTN was launched, the journey seems to be long and tortuous.

- Abhishek Raval

The continuous changes in law, design changes, uncertainty over state-centre dialogue, it was an arduous task to come up with a stable IT platform. Except for the first few days, the glitches in the IT platform continued, post the launch of GSTN in July. Now, the e-way bill has also been launched, which widens the scope of the system. In this backdrop, it’s interesting to know the GSTN was over-designed and it did prove to serve a purpose. The anticipation made by the team on designing the network for more number of users than it was initially estimated for proved right because the actual number of users have overshot the number of users estimated.

The GSTN rollout was divided into three phases with the first, second and the third phase logically divided into external, internal and analytics components respectively. Even though GSTN had provided the rollout plan to the government, the challenge on the way was to submit the final form with the required changes in, for eample, August, which was provided to the GSTN in July.

GSTN - Challenges for the taxpayer

The biggest challenge and change in management came in the form of the reconciliatory nature of Goods and Services Tax Returns (GSTR) 1,2,3 invoice filing and finalising; until the transaction is tallied by the parties on both sides of the transaction - the receiver and the supplier.

The sales data is uploaded by the seller, whose purchase data is automatically taken by the system based on the data uploaded by the suppliers. In case there are any changes, the seller edits the data, which is relayed back again to the buyer for reconciliation. This has to be done in a short time window due to which the industry (taxpayer and tax consultants etc) could not cope and it’s kept on hold. The committee has been set up to do a rethink on this process, to make it more acceptable.