BENGALURU: Karnataka celebrated the GST collection of Rs 11,505 crore which is the second highest in the country. The bigger applause should, however, be reserved for the massive compliance in e-invoicing for those companies with an annual aggregate turnover of Rs 5 crore from Tuesday. With this, the firms that are GST registered can upload all their business-to-business invoices to the invoice registration portal.
Official sources said, “The Invoice Registration Portal generates and returns a unique invoice reference number, digitally signed e-invoice and a QR code to the user.”
Sources at the National Informatics Centre (NIC) said, “Statistics reveal that 1.11 crore e-invoices were generated on July 31 which is the highest for any day in the last 34 months. The monthly e-invoices generated for July were 18.45 crore which is a record.”
Commercial Tax Commissioner C Shikha said, “E-invoicing which was only for a slab of Rs 500 crore has been gradually brought down in stages over the past three years to Rs 5 crore. This will ensure greater revenue collection because the number of payers approximately doubled because the tax net net spread wider. An e-invoice facilitates better compliance naturally.’’
On the state’s share of GST, she said it is Rs 5627 crore for June and Rs 4,721 crore for July which is encouraging. FKCCI GST Committee Chairman BT Manohar said, “E-invoice is important as it is generated on a government portal. It means the transaction is genuine and also means there is revenue generated to the government. It cannot be fake. This will ensure there is no evasion or leakage of revenue. In the days to come, this will obviously result in more revenue collection.’’
In a related matter, Revenue Minister Krishna Byre Gowda, who represents Karnataka in the GST Council, raised the issue of betting in online gaming where people put in large amounts of money. He said, “We will seek to bring betting on online gaming under GST compliance and it has been discussed in the GST Council.
The GST council meeting will be held on Wednesday through video-conferencing and effective measures to levy taxes will be discussed. We plan to discuss the nuances of taxing online betting games. Not all online games, but only that involve betting will come under its ambit. Many families have complained that they have suffered heavy losses because of certain members of the family indulging in betting on online games.”