The gross GST collections for November surpassed the previous month to hit the second-highest mop-up ever at Rs.1,31, 526 crore. The total IGST collected was Rs.66,815 crore, which included Rs.33,165 from imports. The CGST and SGST collected were Rs.23,978 crore and Rs.31,127 crore, respectively, while cess collections stood at Rs.9,606 crore.
The revenues for November 2021 are 25% higher than the GST revenues for November 2020 and 27% higher than November 2019. November’s collections are second only to April 2021’s collections, which include the year-end revenues. Hence, this is definitely an indication of India’s economic recovery, and that business activity has returned to normal. This is the second month in a row that the GST revenues have crossed Rs.1.30 lakh crore mark.
The trend of higher GST revenues is a result of various policy and administrative measures taken by the government to improve compliance. The central tax enforcement agencies and their state counterparts have detected a large number of tax evasion cases, especially those related to fake invoices, using IT tools developed by the GSTN. They use the GST returns, invoice, and e-way bill data to detect suspicious taxpayers.
The government has carried out a huge number of initiatives over the past year, such as system capacity enhancement, auto-population of GST returns, blocking of e-way bills, nudging of non-filers after the return filing due dates, amongst others. This has led to an increase in return filing over the past few months. One of the other reasons why the last couple of months saw two of the highest mop-ups could also be due to the huge number of festival sales.
For any clarifications/feedback on the topic, please contact the writer at athena.rebello@cleartax.in
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