GST portal is ready to handle up to 3 lakh taxpayers concurrently as indirect tax e-filings rise

In a relief for taxpayers, the Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN) portal has been enabled to handle double the taxpayer traffic for return filings.

This comes after the GST infrastructure was upgraded to handle up to three lakh concurrent users at a time, ANI reported.

"The GSTN Portal now successfully handles almost double the taxpayer traffic for return filing immediately after lockdown. It has been made possible as the GST infra has been upgraded to handle up to three lakh concurrent logged-in users at a time," an official statement said.

The newer upgrade now enables the GSTN to handle and scale up to five lakh concurrently logged-in taxpayers if required, the report said. The aim of the government is to smoothen the process as e-filings of indirect tax are set to rise due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A previous augmentation to three lakh concurrent logged-in users from half that amount was undertaken in June as a proactive measure to handle the surge after the lockdown were eased nationwide, according to the report.

"The GST eco-system is future-ready to offer a seamless experience to the taxpayers with its augmented capacity even beyond the current load limits. Taking the surge during the peak filing into consideration, GSTN also took on the performance and stress testing of GST System applications that helped identify and remove bottlenecks in the software," the statement read.

There was a sudden jump in September of the GSTR-3B form filing, the monthly return filed by the normal taxpayers, as per GSTN data.

"It is noteworthy to mention that the number of active taxpayer numbers has effectively doubled since the launch of GST at approximately 1.3 crore. This surge was due to the backlog in the filing of previous months' returns for which relaxations were provided to the taxpayers in view of the Covid-19 outbreak," the statement noted.