The Finance Ministry had recently extended the deadline for filing September 2018 GSTR-3B sales returns to October 25. The earlier deadline was October 20.
Along with the deadline for return filing, the due date for ITC (input tax credit) claim for the period of July 2017-March 2018 has also been extended till October 25.
Traders, however, are not very happy with the news as the extension of just 5 days is not expected to cause any benefit. In response to the notice, Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) wrote a letter to finance minister asking him to further extend the deadline for September GST returns filing till December 31, as the businessmen are still facing a lot of technical issues on the GST portal which slows down the filing process.
“In the wake of no proper functioning of GST portal causing lot of harassment to tax return filers, we at the first instance urged your good self to extend the due date of filing GSTR 3B for the month of September 2018 till December 31, 2018,” CAIT said.
In the letter to Jaitley, CAIT secretary general Praveen Khandelwal said that the website still has numerous glitches which are making it nearly impossible for dealers/consultants to file their September returns. The further extension of the due date will ensure that traders have enough time to claim ITC of FY 2017-18.
CAIT claimed that the portal has been experiencing technical issues since the last few days and cannot take over 1,50,000 users at once, leading to constant server errors. There are other miscellaneous errors showing on the portal, such as numbers automatically converting into zero and uploading errors.
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“In such kind of critical situation, a concrete solution is ought to be evolved and make GST a dream law and not a nightmare. It may also be inferred from the facts that the intention of the government is to increase the revenue out of late fees income, which is shameful” CAIT said in its letter.
