Date - 13 June 2022

• Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) chairman Vivek Johri said the GST council will take a decision on the demand by Goa and other smaller states on continuing with compensation cess.
• The Union government is relying increasingly on data analytics to stay ahead of tax evaders.
• Johri said that the GST council has now decided two things. “One is that the filing of all returns should be sequential, including the GSTR-1 return, through which the credit is passed on. Earlier it was not sequential. So even if you have not filed past returns, you could file the returns this month and pass on the credit, whether you pay the tax to the government or not is not relevant.”
• “We have said that all GSTR-1 returns have to be filed sequentially, so if you have not filed the past month’s return, you cannot file this month’s returns.”
• The CBIC chief said that a more important change is that if you have not filed GSTR-3B (through which you pay the tax in the preceding month), from the next month, you cannot file GSTR-1 itself, which means you cannot pass on any credits. Hence, the time period available to such evaders is compressed to the minimum. The second thing we have done is that we are using data analytics in a very big way to identify such wrongdoers. We apply risk management techniques to identify them.”