GSTN enables tax-officers keep moving despite the lockdown
-Provided secured access to over 1700 tax officers from 18 States/UTs to work remotely
-Shares data of applications processed during the first 10 days of lockdown
-Over 20,000 registration and about 8000 refund cases processed until 03rd April 2020
The Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN) has said that has enabled tax officers of different states and union territories (UTs) to access their offices during the lockdown period. The company is providing secured access to the office network on request. Till 31st March 2020, it had enabled 1748 tax officers from 18 States/UTs through the Virtual Private Network (VPN), a secure way to access the office network. This is in addition to the three hill states which already connect to GST System using VPN.
Apart from 1.23 crores taxpayers, GSTN provides the IT services to 29 States/UTs also for implementation of GST. For these states and UTs, GSTN provides back-office applications like processing of registration application, processing of refund applications, audit, assessment, appeal etc. for all their tax officers, which is different from the front-end interface used by the taxpayer, i.e. GST portal. Soon after the lockdown was announced, GSTN, the IT backbone of GST, offered secured access to all these states to enable their officers to work remotely.
After the request from these States/UTs, the nominated officers were provided the VPN to access the back office and they are executing their job remotely without any hassle. This is helping officers to avoid the backlog which could have happened if the cases were not processed during the lockdown. With the provision of auto-approval of applications, if not processed by the tax officer in a time-bound manner, the officers want them to do it manually to avoid any future complication.
As per the data shared by GSTN, a total number of 20,273 registration-related cases were processed during the first 10 days of lockdown, i.e. from 25th March to 3rd April 2020. This includes 10,077 cases of new registration, 3377 cases of core amendment, 3784 cases of cancellation by application, 1966 cases of cancellation by suo moto and 1069 cases of revocation. Similarly, 7876 cases of refund were also processed during the period.
The Tax Dept. seems to have jumped into overdrive mode, so as to facilitate an upkeep within their coffers. While true that a country runs on taxes, will the department be able to justify raking in money from a stricken populace, who have had their lives overturned by the sudden pandemic? A gradual tax upon the so-called 1% of the population over two years, where they would “trickle-down” their funds into the economy, for future subsidies and ‘favors’ in the future, Or a post-dated tax could be implemented on them, wherein the richest few would shell out up to tow years of their taxes, with a promise of a heavy tax break in the future.
~Sanjeev Nanda