Goods and Services Tax (GST) refunds for exporters, worth over ₹5,000 crore, are stuck as wrong filings of GSTR 3, a monthly return with the summarised details of sales, purchases and sales during the month along with the amount of GST liability, has not yet been revised.

“The Finance Ministry recently directed the GST Authority to take data from the Customs department and sort it out manually, but the process has not started yet,” a government official told BusinessLine .

“Manual correction is tedious, but it has to be done,” the official added.

According to industry estimates, the amount stuck due to the failure to revise GSTR 3 returns is between ₹5,000 crore and ₹10,000 crore.

“This is a big amount, and we hope steps are taken soon to rectify it so that the amount can be released to us,” a Delhi-based exporter said.

While the government says it has sanctioned GST refunds worth about ₹12,700 crore or 80 per cent of the eligible claims of exporters, this does not take into account the claims where returns have been filed wrongly.

“The percentage of sanction would be much lower than 80 per cent if you take into account the claims stuck due to non-revision of returns,” the exporter said.

Many exporters have filed GSTR 3 erroneously as it is complicated and they are unfamiliar with it. “There are concepts such as zero-rated supply, non-GST supply and nil-rated goods, which are confusing for the exporters,” the official said.

Securing Input Tax Credit (ITC) refunds, too, continues to be a big problem for exporters. While about 1.6 lakh online claims have been filed, only about 24,000 of the claims have been filed manually.

“It is obvious that exporters are facing problems in filing returns manually while dealing with field officers,” the official said.

“The government should look into the problem if it wants it to be sorted out,” the official added.

GST was launched all over India on July 1, 2017, with the objective of bringing the nation under a unified indirect taxation system.

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