November sees second highest GST collection at Rs 1.31 lakh crore

The Goods and Services Tax collection hit Rs 1.31 lakh crore in November, the second-highest since the new indirect tax regime was implemented over four years ago and indicating the government’s GST kitty may surpass the Budget estimates set at Rs 22.2 lakh crore for the current financial year.

Prior to this, the GST collection had hit Rs 1.40 lakh crore in April. The November collection stands at Rs 1,31,526 crore. June was the only month when the GST collections dropped below Rs 1 lakh crore this year.

The GST revenues for November were 25 per cent higher than a year ago, the data showed.

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“The GST collection figures tie up with the economic growth figures reported recently and indicate that the collections have now stabilised at a level which will enable crossing the GST revenue targets for FY22. The increase in collections across major states ranging from 18 per cent to 30 per cent points to an economic revival across states…,” said M S Mani, Partner, Deloitte India.

The Central GST collections were at Rs 23,978 crore, state GST at Rs 31,127 crore, Integrated GST was at Rs 66,815 crore (including Rs 32,165 crore collected on import of goods) and the cess collection was at Rs 9,606 crore.

"The collections of November are indicative of a robust economic growth. The collections should continue to see a rise in the months to come, if we don't see another Covid waive in the country," Rajat Bose, Partner, Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co said.

The government has settled Rs 27,273 crore to CGST and Rs 22,655 crore to SGST from IGST as regular settlement.

The total revenue of centre and the states after regular settlements in November was Rs 51,251 crore for CGST and Rs 53,782 crore for the SGST. Centre has also released Rs 17,000 crore to states/UTs towards GST compensation on November 3.

“The recent trend of high GST revenues has been a result of various policy and administrative measures that have been taken in the past to improve compliance. Central tax enforcement agencies, along with the state counterparts have detected large tax evasion cases, mainly cases relating to fake invoices, with the help of various IT tools developed by GSTN that use the return, invoice and e-way bill data to find suspicious taxpayers,” said the finance ministry.

A large number of initiatives undertaken in the last one year like, enhancement of system capacity, nudging non-filers after last date of filing of returns, auto-population of returns, blocking of e-way bills and passing of input tax credit for non-filers has led to consistent improvement in the filing of returns over the last few months, it said.

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