LUDHIANA: Even after six months of its launch the GSTN (Goods and services tax network) portal is giving nightmare to the taxation professionals and business community. The technical glitches coupled with the slow processing on the portal are making matters worse for the stakeholders who are demanding that government revamps its system at the earliest or introduce offline return filing facility so that load on the portal is reduced.

Speaking to TOI, Mohinder Aggarwal, state secretary of Punjab Pradesh Beopar Mandal ( PPBM ) said, “At one side government is pressing upon the business community to abide by to the rules and regulations of GST but on the other hand it has totally failed to make the system of GST return filing smooth and user friendly for us. One of the biggest flaws of the GSTN portal is that ever since July 2017 the facility of getting print out of return 3-B has not been started. The system is so slow on this portal that till now only 63 percent of the tax payers have been able to file their returns as the server problem is so frequent that it takes hours and sometimes days for assesses to file their return on this portal” Aggarwal also said, “Moreover the GSTR-2 filing facility has not been yet started on the portal which has increased the risk of bogus billing by large."

According to Sunil Mehra , general secretary of PPBM, “Compliance of GST especially return uploading and filing has become great headache for us. As the number of users is increasing day by day on the GSTN portal the system is becoming more and more prone to technical problems due to large traffic flow, due to which we are paying heavy price as we are being levied penalties for late filing of returns. Therefore we request the government either all the technical problems being faced by us on the GSTN portal should be over come at the earliest or start the system of offline return filing which is far less complicated than the online system.”

