Auto-population of e-Invoice Details into GSTR-1 for December 2020

In an advisory dated 11th January 2021, the GST Network has asked the taxpayers notified for e-invoicing to file GSTR-1 as per their respective records for December 2020. Meanwhile, the authority has promised to rectify the gaps in the auto-population feature soon.

For the December 2020 return period, the due date to file GSTR-1 was 11th January 2021. The authority noticed differences in auto-populated data into GSTR-1 compared to the e-invoice portal or the Invoice Registration Portal. It is on account of missing e-invoice information in GSTR-1 that was failed to be auto-populated. 

An advisory was previously issued on 30th December 2020 that the e-invoices are being auto-populated into the GSTR-1 from 3rd December 2020 onwards. The option is made available for GSTR-1 returns filed from the October 2020 return period. As per the advisory, the taxpayers could modify or delete only those auto-populated documents that are not as per the actual documents issued. 

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Otherwise, GST portal allows the auto-populated documents to be edited or deleted by the taxpayer. In such cases where edits are made, fields such as the ‘Source’, ‘IRN’ and ‘IRN date’ will be reset to blank in the respective tables of GSTR-1. In turn, it will not get reflected in the GSTR-2A or GSTR-2B. The edited documents will be handled as though they were uploaded separately by the taxpayer and not auto-populated from an e-invoice portal or the IRP. 

Apart from this, the GSTN also mentioned that an additional facility of consolidated excel download of all auto-populated documents is available in the GSTR-1 dashboard. The file also includes the details of cancelled documents but will not have those auto-populated documents edited later on by the taxpayer.

The advisory that was received on the due date was delayed and portrays the lack of system preparedness. It must be noted that an accurate GSTR-1 filing is the onus of the taxpayer. However, suppose a taxpayer filed GSTR-1 by assuming that the Business-to-business (B2B) invoices and export invoices were auto-populated from the IRP. In that case, they cannot revise such GSTR-1 returns now. Such taxpayers will have to carry out amendments in Table 9 of GSTR-1 of the subsequent month. 

The volume of invoices being dealt with is often too high to check differences between two data sets manually. Hence, this incident also leaves an important message for taxpayers to have reliable reconciliation tools in place. 

For any clarifications/feedback on the topic, please contact the writer at annapoorna.m@cleartax.in