The government had collected tax amounting to Rs 86,318 crore during January.
Revenue collection from Goods and Services Tax (GST) touched Rs 85,174 cr in February, falling marginally from previous month’s mop-up, data released by the Finance Ministry showed.
The government had collected tax amounting to Rs 86,318 crore in January.
According to a tax expert, GST collections are now beginning to stabilise, although the expected revenue garnering may take more time.
“It would be logical to assume that significant amount of transition credits availed would now have been utilised, hence the collections would now progressively improve,” M S Mani, Partner at Deloitte India said.
Experts believe that tax collections are also expected to increase in March, 2018 after composition dealers file their quarterly returns, along with implementation of measures against tax evasion such as e-way bill, reverse charge on transactions with unregistered dealers and invoice matching.
The revenue numbers for February indicate tax collection till March 26. Till now, 1.05 crore taxpayers have been registered under the new indirect tax system, out of which 59.51 lakh GSTR 3B (summary form) returns have been filed for February. Out of the total number of taxpayers, 18.17 lakh are composition dealers who file returns every quarter. The numbers indicate that 69 percent of businesses have paid taxes in February.
According to Abhishek A Rastogi, Partner at Khaitan & Co, the gradual increase in the number of GST return filers while being encouraging, still is quite low as 30 percent of taxpayers are not filing returns.
“It must be noted that the 70 percent filers includes those filing nil returns, hence the reasons for non-filing of returns by over 2 million registered taxpayers would be an area of concern for the tax authorities,” Rastogi said.
States have collected revenue of Rs 20,456 cr in February, while the Centre raised Rs 14,945 cr. Rs 42,456 cr was collected as Integrated GST (IGST), which is levied on inter-state supply of goods and services and is divided between states and the Centre, government data showed.
The Centre released Rs 7,317 cr as compensation cess.
As per data available, government had garnered revenue worth Rs 86,703 cr in December, Rs 80,808 cr in November, Rs 83,364 crore in October, Rs 92,150 crore for the month of September, Rs 90,669 crore for August and Rs 94,063 crore in July.