NEW DELHI: The Finance Ministry on Sunday said that the number of GST return filers rose about 65% to 1.13 crore in 5 years till April 2023. The number of active taxpayers registered under GST too increased from 1.06 crore as of April 2018 to 1.40 crore.
As per data shared by the ministry, 90%of eligible taxpayers are filing GSTR-3B returns by the end of the filing month in current fiscal year, up from 68% in 2017-18. “Simplification in Rules and Procedure in GST has resulted in increase in return filing percentage by eligible taxpayers,” the ministry said in a post on X.
Goods and Services Tax (GST) was rolled out on July 1, 2017. The number of GSTR-3B filers increased from 72.49 lakh in April 2018, to 1.13 crore as of April 2023. GSTR-3B is the monthly return form for filing outward supplies details and tax payment. “With effective policy and systemic changes in GST, the compliance level in GST return filing has improved over the years,” the ministry said in another post on X.
Increase in return filing across the years indicates improvement in compliance level, the ministry added. Monthly collection from GST came in at R1.68 lakh crore in November. It is for the sixth time that gross GST collection has crossed R1.60 lakh crore mark in current fiscal.
The GST collection has been showing an upward trend on an annual basis since its rollout on July 1, 2017, and the average gross monthly mop-up in the current fiscal so far is R1.66 lakh crore, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had said in the Lok Sabha earlier this month. The collection had touched a record R1.87 lakh crore in April.