IRONING THE CREASES

A goods and services tax has been a subject matter that had resurfaced multiple times during parliamentary and stakeholder discussions for a long time. With the Constitutional Amendment in 2016, it was made clear that this time around, GST was serious business. The law was enacted in 2017, amidst extensive debates as to whether it was a measure hurried into. Soon, it became clear that the underlying infrastructure that heavily relied on technology, which is also the backbone of GST, was far from ready. Glitches and loopholes plagued the system, exposing that the experimental system could not handle the throughput of actual users accessing the GST Portal. Now, over the course of five years, the Portal has been altered and modified, and one would not be far off, in making an analogy to the ‘Ship of Theseus’, (a thought experiment that questions whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object). The Portal continues to be a ‘work in progress’ and the abandonment of most of the ‘Forms’ is testimony to that fact.

The general feeling is that any new legislation would have teething troubles and that the hurriedly introduced GST Law was no exception. A key question is whether teething troubles were converted into problems that required surgery by the series of amendments. Some statistics (as on 29th April, 2022) with reference to number of amendments and changes through Notifications ar