E-invoice mandatory from October 1 for those with turnover of Rs 10 crore

- Antenna : Vivek Mehta

- Instead of treating GSTR-1 as primary form, if GSTR2 is treated as primary form and accordingly remaining forms GSTR-1A and GSTR-3B are autopopulated, only the trader who takes wrong credit will be penalized.

Annual Rs. E-invoicing has been made mandatory from October 1, 2022 for traders with a turnover of more than 10 crores. They have to create e-invoice only under GST regime. They have to upload their bills for each business transaction by going to the online system of GST itself. Currently Rs. Generation of e-invoices is mandatory for those having a turnover of more than 20 crores. Now e-invoice has been made mandatory for those having annual turnover of Rs.10 crore. After the next budget this annual turnover limit will be reduced to Rs. 5 crore is likely to be made. This is expected to reduce evasion by traders and increase the GST revenue of the government. After the e-invoice is generated, it has to be uploaded on the GST portal. Once the invoice is uploaded, its QR code is generated. It then becomes the invoice number on the GST portal. This invoice is uploaded according to the serial number. According to that number, the buyer of goods gets his tax credit from him. Input tax credit is not available on invoices not uploaded. Consequently, e-invoices are indispensable for those who want to take input tax credit of GST.

Currently the contagion of bogus billing is huge. India has become a single market. So local traders have been buying goods from all over India without any hesitation or fear. In these circumstances, the seller's default in paying the tax burdens the buyer of the goods to deposit the tax again. So honest traders get trapped. Changes in the GST Act are necessary to eliminate this situation completely and there is no loss in the tax revenue of the nation. The main raw material for making brass parts is brass scrap. At present, the campaign against bogus billing shows that most of the cases are commodity scraps. As a result, instead of the forward mechanism, reverse charge mechanism under Section 9(3) of the GST Act can be used to collect tax on commodities classified as dangerous, which can prevent honest traders from getting caught in the clutches of bogus billing. Secondly, the government will receive taxes on time. There will be transparency in tax collection and assessment.

Many scrap collecting groups in India are not organized. Even today, due to low turnover, they are not liable for capital tax under YG. They use brokers to sell their goods and distribute the aggregated goods to the mainstream. In many cases bogus traders are placed at multiple levels throughout the supply chain as these brokers do not want to be subjected to bogus billing and taxation. So from time to time the scam of Billia Rajas comes out. When a scam breaks out, the entire supply chain suffers. Here the wrong traders harass the genuine traders and even the genuine traders who follow the law properly are harassed. They lose faith in law and order. To prevent this, if the end-users in the supply chain are allowed to buy from unorganized traders, the whole situation will present a different picture. At present, Section 40(A) of the Income Tax Act prevents such cash purchases and hence, if this section is amended, the final traders in the supply chain will be able to purchase goods from small traders in cash. If that happens, then the gap in income will stop and the exploitation of small traders will also stop.

At present, GST returns are accepted in terms of selling merchant. In each case the mastermind behind the scam is the merchant selling the goods. The seller of the goods commits a scam and the buyer of the goods suffers every time with or without involvement with the seller of the goods. Even in these cases, the traders who pay taxes to the government are the traders who follow all the rules of the law. Tax expert Akshat Vyas suggests that there is a suggestion to change the flow of forms under GST. According to the new system, the buyer of the goods instead of the seller submits his own form, i.e. GSTR-1, which is considered as the primary form today, GSTR2 is considered as the only and primary form and which is considered as the remaining forms i.e. GSTR-1A and If GSTR-3B is autopopulated, only the trader who takes wrong credit will be penalized. Since the sales figures are digitally generated by the computer, the seller will change them and if they are not fair, the seller will be wrong and penalized. There will be no change in government revenue and two traders will stop being penalized for one issue.