Three out of four Goods & Services Tax (GST) assessees have yet to submit audit conciliation statement for fiscal year 2027-18 (FY 18). The due date for submitting it is January 31. It is mandatory to file an annual return. There are three annual return forms, GSTR 9, GSTR 9A and GSTR 9C. Every GST assessee (those who submitted all the monthly return forms of GSTR 3B and GSTR 1) has to file an annual return in GSTR 9. Among these assessees, every registered taxable person whose turnover during a financial year exceeds ₹2 crore, will also be required to get his accounts audited by a chartered accountant or a cost accountant and then submit a reconciliation statement in GSTR 9C along with GSTR 9.
The assessees under the composition scheme (businesses with turnover up to ₹1.5 crore) will be required to file the GSTR 9A form. According to data made available with the GSTN as on January 27, the IT backbone of indirect tax system, out of the 67.64 lakhs eligible to GSTR 9, little over 31 lakh, or nearly 46 per cent of assessees, have filed. For GSTR 9A, the number of eligible assessees is around 19 lakh, but around only 7.38 lakh assessees, or 39 per cent, have filed the returns so far. However, the bigger problem is with big assessees who have to submit an audit report.
Out of 12.42 lakhs eligible assessees, only around 3 lakh have filed, which is around 24 per cent. Assessees and experts on one side and tax officials on the other have their own set of arguments to explain the current impasse. One of the common grouse from assessees is network problem. It was alleged that the GSTN portal was not responsive last week (during January 20-22) and hence the number of filings was abysmally low. The tool was showing “Error Occurred” or “Processed but pending” as the status and was not generating the report. Also, the 9C utility was not accepting copy paste, so taxpayers had to manually punch in the data, resulting in delay in uploading.