India GST B2B e-invoice live reporting Sep 2019
- Apr 28, 2019 | Richard Asquith
The Indian authority overseeing the Goods and Services Tax regime, the GST Council, has proposed mandating electronic invoicing and pre-approval by the tax authorities. This could commence 1 September 2019 for all B2B transactions. Once successfully established, it would be extended to B2C transactions, too.
The live reporting would include the requirement to submit sales invoices in real-time to the tax authorities for verification and clearance. Only then would the sales invoice be raised for GST and settlement purposes, and sent to the customer as approved. The sales invoice would be assigned a unique government number. This would then be reported in the regular GST return to match with that submission.
An initial report on proposals will be produced before this summer. There will likely be an annual registration threshold for taxpayers for the requirement.
The new e-invoice system would oblige suppliers to submit their e-invoices in real-time via the GST Network. This is the body with the responsibility of building the indirect taxation platform for GST to help taxpayers prepare, file, ammend returns and make payments of indirect tax liabilities. For Indian e-invoicing, GSTN may adopt the same process as the e-way bill regime which is used by businesses to report for tax the movement of goods over intra-state borders.
The Indian e-invoice proposal replicates systems in South America, South Korea and Italy. These e-invoice pre-approval regimes have been deployed to reduce tax fraud by non or under declaring of VAT transactions.
