A majority of show-cause notices issued to taxpayers under the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime last year pertained to ‘data discrepancies’ in tax return filings, and efforts are underway to use technology to resolve such mismatches and mitigate the resultant disputes as well as ‘pain points for taxpayers,’ a top indirect tax official said on Tuesday.

GST officials issued a little under 1.13 lakh show-cause notices to tax payers in 2023-24, but classification disputes on tax rates were behind just 555 of those notices. “So, policy-level disputes are much less, and it is more the disputes that are relating to how we are doing our data verification,” said Special Secretary and Member (GST) of the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) Shashank Priya. 

An analysis by the CBIC showed six of the seven major areas of dispute resulting in show- cause notices pertained to data discrepancies, such as “short payment of GST in GSTR 3B when compared to GSTR1 liability, excess availment of input tax credit (ITC) in GSTR 3B when compared with ITC available in GSTR 2A, non-payment of GST on taxable services under reverse charge mechanism (RCM)”, Mr. Priya said at Assocham’s national GST conference.

The GST Network is working on introducing a new register for addressing the RCM challenges by creating a ledger that reflects all reverse charges liable to be paid, with a functionality to disallow taking ITC beyond what’s available to taxpayers, the CBIC member informed.

Source: The Hindu