NEW DELHI: Goods and services tax collections grew about 9% in December to Rs 1.03 lakh crore, from Rs 94,726 crore a year earlier, the government said on Wednesday. An official said this improvement had come largely because of steps taken to increase compliance and check evasion. Collections expanded 6% year-on-year in November, after falling for the previous two months.The government has undertaken several measures in the past months to improve collections. Revenue secretary Ajay Bhushan Pandey met with senior officials in December and sent out a message to maximise collections. Field officers were directed to cancel registration and block input tax credit for defaulters. “GST revenues in December 2019 from domestic transactions have shown an impressive growth of 16% over revenues collected in December 2018,” a finance ministry statement said.If Integrated GST (IGST) from imports are considered, total revenue rose 9%, it said. IGST revenue on imported goods fell 10% from a year earlier. However, this was an improvement from a drop of 13% in November and 20% in October.The total number of GST returns filed from November till December was 81.21 lakh.Among provinces, Jammu and Kashmir showed the highest year-on-year increase in collections, which rose 40% to Rs 409 crore last month.Maharashtra achieved the highest GST collection at Rs 16,530 crore, a 22% increase from December last year.“The reversal in the trend of declining GST collections should continue for the remaining months of the current fiscal (year) in order to keep the fiscal deficit under control, said M S Mani, a partner at Deloitte India.From the total, collections of central GST (CGST) were Rs 19,962 crore and state GST (SGST) were Rs 26,792 crore.Collections from imports totalled Rs 21,295 crore and revenue from cess was Rs 8,331 crore in the past month.The government has settled Rs 21,814 crore to CGST and Rs 15,366 crore to SGST from IGST of Rs 48,099 crore as regular settlement, it said. This brought the total revenue earned by the central and state governments in December to Rs 41,776 crore of CGST and Rs 42,158 crore for SGST.“With the trend of improving collections and the e-invoicing, and new returns slated in the coming months, it is now expected that the GST collections would show a steady improvement, although it may still fall short of the annual targets,” Mani said.