With just three days to go before the rollout of electronic way bill (e-way bill), the government is concerned about the slow pace at which taxpayers are readying themselves for it. The portal for the e-way bill, an anti-evasion mechanism to track cargo movement in the GST regime, has witnessed just 11 lakh registrations so far, while the GST taxpayer base is over a crore. The mechanism requires taxpayers to electronically generate e-way bill on the designated portal for transportation of goods worth over Rs 50,000. The taxpayer would have to provide details of cargo, its origin and destination among other specifications to obtain the bill. Speaking at the fifth foundation of GST Network (GSTN) — the IT backbone for GST — finance secretary Hasmukh Adhia said, “I’m not too sure whether traders, dealers and transporters are still ready. I would like to appeal to them to register themselves on the e-way bill portal as early as possible; they should not then tell us that we didn’t inform them.”
Fewer registrations mean that as many as 90 lakh taxpayers could register on the portal in the next three days, which is likely to put the portal under heavy strain. “So far only 11 lakh of the existing taxpayers have registered for e-way bill. The fear is that many will come on the last day to register as all businesses would need e-way bills except some service providers,” Prakash Kumar, CEO of GSTN said at the event. In a bid to check revenue leakage in business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions, the implementation of e-way bill was advanced to February 1 but the portal lacked the capacity to handle the load and crashed on the first day itself prompting the GST Council to delay rollout to April 1. From April 1, the system will be implemented in a phased manner starting from applicability on inter-state movements firstly, followed by intra-state transport in states in a staggered manner.
“The main problem is there is no data to suggest how many bills will be generated daily. So earlier, it was based on experience from one state (Karnataka), which proved to be inadequate. Now we have tripled the capacity and based on live experience, we can ramp up capacity further as actual numbers of e-way bills generated daily becomes visible,” Kumar told FE. He added that currently 6-7 lakh e-way bills were being generated daily in the trial phase.
The e-way bill portal has been designed and developed by National Informatics Centre (NIC). After the failed launch on April 1, the system has been strengthened to handle 75 lakh inter-state e-way bills daily. Separately, Kumar said that GSTN is ready to implement the new and simplified return-filing mechanism, which is currently under deliberation at the GST Council. He added that GSTN would need time to make changes for the new mechanism if it is vastly different from the current forms that include GSTR-3B, GSTR-1,2 and 3.
