GSTN: TEETHING TROUBLES?

Imagine that it’s 2005, and you’re booking a train ticket on the IRCTC website. You patiently click your way through a hedgerow of links searching for the train (waiting each time for the website to catch up, and praying it doesn’t hang and make you start afresh). Train found, you carefully type in all the personal and financial information the website demands, then cross your fingers and click ‘send’. The page abruptly turns white, and then displays this message: ‘Processing. Do not refresh or close this page.’ A few minutes pass, and your bank informs you via SMS that it has made note of your transaction, and that you are poorer for it. You look at the computer screen. It looks back. Some time later, it flashes and displays a different message. ‘Transaction failed. Please try again.’

Now, imagine that it’s 2017, and that just happened with your GSTN tax return.

Since the GSTN window for July tax returns went online, newspapers have reported on a growing litany of complaints. Some businesses claim that taxes have been paid, but their GSTN receipts say otherwise. Others received receipts with inexplicable errors. Many were not able to file their taxes at all because of ‘server delays’ and ‘session timeouts’. So great was the protest that the initial deadline for the filing of July tax returns was pushed five days, to September 10. But before that date could even arrive, on September 8, gst.gov.in crashed. The deadline has now been pushed

again, this time to October 10.

Some blame the crash on too many returns being filed at the last moment. That is strange, if true: in late July, The Hindu quoted former GSTN chairman Navin Kumar as saying: “We studied taxpayer behaviour… [and] found that 50% of taxpayers file their returns on the last day, and during that last day, most are between 4-5 pm… We kept that in mind while designing the system.”

Implementation could well be the problem. Reports suggest that critical components of the website—including data on the rates and classification of goods, which must be ‘coded’ into online forms before they can be used to file returns—are even now being ‘tweaked’. Here’s an example: on the same day that finance minister Arun Jaitley announced the new deadline of October 10, he also announced a slew of changes to the tax code: tax rates for several goods like raincoats and rubber bands were reduced, cesses on several segments of cars were increased and khadi was exempted entirely. Each of those ‘tweaks’ is a programming exercise that requires the likes of Infosys to manage. Acknowledging the problem, the government has formed a monitoring committee under Bihar deputy chief minister Sushil Modi to look into the matter.

These problems are all the more exasperating because they were foreseen. Just days before the GST became a reality, india today asked finance minister Jaitley if he would consider postponing the rollout to give critical infrastructure more time to develop. “Initial confusion or transformational problems will be there even if you do it on the 1st of September,” he replied. “If it is done earlier, we’ll be able to settle the problems—that’s the philosophy.”

More tellingly, on the same day that he announced the new deadline, the FM also revealed a point of ‘good cheer’. Collections under the GST, to the tune of Rs 95,000 crore, he said, had surpassed expectations. That is success, of a sort. Just not the kind the taxpayer was hoping for.