Revenue collections from the Goods and Services Tax (GST) have crossed ₹1-lakh crore a month for the second time after the introduction of new indirect tax regime in July last year.

“GST collections for October have crossed ₹1 lakh crore. The success of GST is lower rates, lesser evasion, higher compliance, only one tax and negligible interference by taxation authorities,” Finance Minister Arun Jaitley tweeted. October’s collections are less than the budget estimate of ₹1.10-lakh crore, but given that collections have been hovering around ₹95,000-96,000 crore, this number suggests that the new indirect tax regime is settling down.

A Finance Ministry statement on Thursday noted that the total gross GST revenue in October was a little over ₹1-lakh crore. Of this, CGST (Central Goods and Services Tax) was ₹16,464 crore, and SGST (State Goods and Services Tax) and IGST (integrated Goods and Services Tax) contributed ₹22,826 crore and ₹53,419 crore, respectively. The total cess collection was ₹8,000 crore.

October’s collection of ₹ 1,00,710 crore is 6.64 per cent higher than the ₹94,442 crore for September.

For the current year, the States that posted extraordinary growth in total taxes collected are Kerala (44 per cent), Jharkhand (20 per cent), Rajasthan (14 per cent), Uttarakhand (13 per cent) and Maharashtra (11 per cent).

According to MS Mani, Partner at Deloitte India, collections may have risen on account of the stabilisation of GST processes, and the anti-evasion measures. The onset of the festival season also helped. The total number of GSTR 3B Returns filed for September up to October 31 was 67.45 lakh. There are over 1.14 crore assessees.

The government has settled ₹17,490 crore to CGST and ₹15,107 crore to SGST from IGST. Further, ₹30,000 crore has been settled from the balance IGST available with the Centre on provisional basis in the ratio of 50:50 between the Centre and the States. The total revenue earned by Central and the State governments after regular and provisional settlement in October was ₹48,954 crore for CGST and ₹52,934 crore for the SGST.

Commenting on the collection, Abhishek A Rastogi, Partner at Khaitan & Co said that both the compliance and tax collections show much improved reflection of the GST framework. The reasons could predominantly be due to festive shopping, increase in import duty collection and better compliance. The Government should continue to focus on increasing Custom duty within the WTO framework and addressing the loopholes in Foreign Trade Agreements. “As the collections have improved, the Government should examine the delays in refund including Budgetary Support especially in cases where money has not been sanctioned within the defined statutory period. The relief to the domestic players, exporters and MSME sector will further improve business sentiments,” he said.

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