With less than a month to go to the 1st July target date for GST adoption in India, the question on everybody’s mind is this: will the launch of the much-awaited Goods & Service Tax (GST) be postponed again or is the 1st July deadline definitive?
Our team has been monitoring legal developments in India for quite some time. We’ve been analysing existing and draft legislation in order to create a compliant solution for e-invoicing, both under the existing tax structure and under GST.
Surprisingly, we still cannot answer the burning question with 100% certainty. Here’s what we do know:
- The final GST legislation has been adopted and published. Rules on invoicing are not regulated in detail in these laws, but in supporting documentation to the GST laws that in turn have been approved by the GST Council.
- Senior officials in the Indian government have publicly stated that the 1st July deadline will be adhered to, and other officials are urging businesses not to believe rumors about the deadline possibly being postponed by 2 months.
- According to the government-run web portal ‘GST India’, all states have now agreed (on what basis is unclear though) that the entry into force will be 1st July. This week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi chaired a GST review meeting, to ‘take stock of the readiness of the country for the roll-out of GST on July 1’ – nothing reported from that meeting suggests any flexibility on the deadline.
All in all, this tells us that the forces driving the GST implementation are unlikely to accept any delays. However, it also tells us that the GST project is not nearly as ready as one could hope for with such little time remaining. Our answer to the original question is: Yes – all indicates that 1st July will indeed be the day of the big switch to GST. At TrustWeaver we’re working at full speed to be ready for that switch – are you ready yet?
Here are three things you could already consider:
- Check internally within your organisation to see how you are working with the GST implementation.
- Understand how your processes ensure compliance by asking internally; or if you have outsourced the e-invoicing process, by asking your service provider.
- Ask for Sovos – we already work with the world’s biggest B2B service providers, so make sure that your service provider is Sovos-Enabled.
