No proposal to relax e-invoicing under GST regime, finance minister says

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India has no proposal to relax the mandatory provisions of e-invoicing under the goods and services tax regime, according to a parliamentary response by the finance minister.

“At present, there is no such proposal,” Nirmala Sitharaman said on July 26 in a written response to a lawmaker’s question in the parliament’s upper house, when asked if the government is contemplating relaxing the mandatory provisions of e-invoices. “Currently, E-invoicing is mandatory for taxpayers with aggregate turnover of more than Rs. 20 crores in a financial year with effect from 01.04.2022.”

e-invoicing is a system in which business-to-business invoices are authenticated electronically by the Goods and Services Tax Network for use on the common GST portal. Invoice information is transferred from a portal to the GST portal and e-way bill portal in real-time, eliminating the need for manual data entry while filing GSTR-1 return as well as generation of a part of the e-way bills.

e-invoicing plugs a major gap in data reconciliation under GST to reduce mismatch errors and allow interoperability, backward integration, and automation of the tax return filing process and faster availability of genuine input tax credits.

The system also reduces the possibility of audits or surveys by the tax authorities as the information is available at a transaction level.

The GST e-invoicing is expected to be mandatory for firms with a turnover of over Rs 5 crore from next year, tax officials have said.