December 10, 2019
Dr Amit Mitra raises questions over GST network
Bengal finance and industries minister Dr Amit Mitra on December 7 slammed the hasty introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) without an adequate technology backbone. He focussed on the inability of the country to still undertake invoice matching digitally under the Goods and Services Tax.
“Around 3,600 crore invoices were supposed to be uploaded every year and we are not ready with the IT system. Even today we are filling a short form for GST, which does not require invoice uplinking,” Dr Mitra said.
He added that as a result of this deficiency, there are instances of fraud under the indirect tax regime even as the central government is unable to push tax collections.
“We are talking about not collecting enough money in GST. This is because we are not uplinking invoices and there is no invoice matching and all this is IT-related,” he said.
Dr Mitra said the Bangla government was pushing for digitisation of land records and was looking to introduce electronic deeds soon as an option.
“All registration records since 2005 being digitised, we now want to move to the next stage. We want to move to e-deeds as an option first and then make it compulsory. Digital signatures of both parties will be accepted and deeds will be registered,” he said.
He also said that the state has been able to attract global players such as Fujisoft in emerging technology areas of 3D processing.
