To facilitate trade, the government has extended the last date for filing GSTR-2 & GSTR-3 for July 2017 to November 30 and December 11, 2017 respectively.A notification in this regard is being issued shortly - to facilitate about 30.81 lakh taxpayers for filing GSTR-2 for month of July, 2017.The last date for filing of final sales returns for July in GSTR-1 form was October 10, while the date for uploading of purchase returns in GSTR-2 was kept at October 31. This is now revised to November 30.Taxpayers have complained about various issues faced when it came to tackling GSTR-2. "Extension of deadline for GSTR 2 was inevitable as portal failed to reflect the credits accepted from GSTR 2A even till the last moment," says KPMG India, Partner, Priyajit Ghosh.Ghosh adds that since you cannot file GSTR 3 without determining the credits as per GSTR 2, hence, a corollary to the extension of GSTR 2 deadline.The final GSTR-3, matching GSTR-1 and 2, was to be filed by November 10, but is now revised to December 11."It is an excellent move to grant a further extension of the return filing timelines, which will enable many more taxpayers to become compliant," says Deloitte India, Partner, MS Mani.Over the weekend the ministerial panel chaired by Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Modi had flagged issues faced by taxpayers in filing GSTR-2. Taxpayers were facing difficulties in reconciling different entries and Infosys and GST Network (GSTN) was asked to sort out the issues.“GSTR-2 is the most important return for GST compliance since availability of ITC depends on it. This return requires matching and reconciling and automatic review, to make sure manual effort is minimised. Since the last date for submission of audited ITRs and GSTR-2 coincided, it put a strain on some taxpayers. Besides, the ecosystem also needs some more stability and preparedness for smooth compliance to take place,” said Archit Gupta, Founder & CEO ClearTax in a statement.Invoice matching, that happens during the GSTR 2 process, is unique to India and the Group of Ministers on the functioning of GSTN, felt that the focus of the portal should be on this part f return filing."We have flagged the issues being faced by businesses in various states. There are problems regarding uploading the returns and matching invoices. This the first time GSTR-2 is being filed and hence there are issues," said Modi had said on Saturday."GSTR-2 is more challenging because there will be matching of invoices. As many as 45 crore invoices were uploaded in GSTR-1 which have to be matched," Modi added.“Extension of TRAN 1 deadline has also enhanced the timeline of many assessees who were forced to key thousands of line items manually as the Excel utility is still unavailable. Similarly, the revision facility of TRAN 1 is still unavailable, while the deadline would have expired tomorrow,” says Ghosh.