The Central Board of Excise and Custom (CBIC) on Friday reported settling GST (Goods and Services Tax) refund claims worth ₹5,575 crore.

Since March 30, the board processed nearly 13,000 refund applications. “While in the last week itself, CBIC has processed 7,873 claims worth ₹3,854 crore,” it said.

The effort is to help GST returns filers to facilitate early ITC (Input Tax Credit) refunds and to ensure that the wrong ITC claims are not processed in the absence of relevant information.

The board said that this measure was taken into effect with GST Council’s approval in its 39th Meeting held on March 14 to mitigate delays in ITC refunds faced by the taxpayers besides ensuring that fake ITC claims are not processed.

It was noticed that lot of time is spent in verification of whether the credit was availed on services and/or Capital Goods in certain categories for the refund claims.

CBIC said that in order to address the difficulty faced by trade in providing this data at the time of processing of claim leading to delays and increase in compliance cost, it was decided in the GST Council to make declaration of classification codes a part of the application itself.

The GST Council in the same meeting also decided to allow bunching of tax periods across financial years to facilitate claim of refund by exporters. This would apply to applications filed after March 31.

It may also be noted that the due date of all such applications which were due during March 20 and June 29 has been extended till June 30.

CBIC explained that the Circular No. 133 (dated March 31) is with regard to the requirement to give HSN (Harmonized System of Nomenclature)/SAC (Services Accounting Code) along with the refund application.

The GST law doesn’t allow refund of credit availed on services and/or capital goods in certain categories. For example, capital goods ITC refund is not permissible for refund of ITC on account of exports and other zero-rated supplies. Further, ITC availed on services and capital goods are not allowed to be refunded in Inverted Structure Refund category.

I-T refunds

Meanwhile, the Central Board of Direct Taxes said that income tax refunds to nearly 8.2 lakh small businesses (proprietors, firms, corporate and trusts) worth ₹5,204 crore have been issued since April 8.

These refunds would help MSMEs brace the impact of Covid-19 on their businesses.

comment COMMENT NOW