GST Council to meet on 20th, may discuss E-Invoice for Businesses above 50 Crore Threshold

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The first meeting of the GST Council post- Lok Sabha polls will be on 20th June where the Government is likely to propose Rs 50 crore as the turnover threshold for entities to generate e-invoice on a centralised government portal for business-to-business (B2B) sales as it looks to curb GST evasion, reports said.
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The meeting would be chaired by the new Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.
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Analysis of return filing shows that as many as 68,041 businesses have reported a turnover of over Rs 50 crore and accounted for 66.6 percent of total GST paid in 2017-18.
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Further, while these businesses account for just 1.02 percent of GST payers, they make up almost 30 percent of the B2B invoices generated in the system.
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“The turnover threshold for entities to generate e-invoice for B2B sales is likely to be fixed at Rs 50 crore if the GST Council agrees. With this threshold, big taxpayers who are better placed technologically to integrate their software would have to generate e-invoice for B2B sales,” the official told PTI.
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The ministry is planning to roll out the e-invoice system by September. The twin objectives of the move are to ease compliance by the entities with turnover above Rs 50 crore by saving them from filing returns and uploading invoices and to curb tax evasion through invoice misuse.
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So far, there are so many tax evasion cases reported by the tax department where the businesses used fake invoices as a tool to evade tax and claim input tax credit which ultimately caused revenue leakage.
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The official further said that under the current system, there is a gap between the time of generation invoices and filing of sales returns.
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The number of entities filing monthly summary sales return GSTR-3B and paying GST is higher than those filing outward supply return GSTR-1, in which invoice-wise details have to be filed. Analysis suggests the gap could be either because of genuine difficulty in uploading invoices or with the intention of misusing Input Tax Credit (ITC), the official said.
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The official said 1 crore invoice generation per day can be handled by GSTN/NIC as this would be similar to the number of e-way bills currently being generated on the portal.