Surge in number: GST returns in October jump 36%, collections up 10%

GSTN’s capacity was enhanced from 1.5 lakh concurrent users in June in anticipation of a surge of tax returns owing to the pandemic and subsequent deferrals in the original deadlines.

The monthly GST returns (GSTR-3B) in October saw a 36% jump compared with corresponding period a year ago as the collections grew by over 10% in the month, and breached the Rs 1-lakh-crore mark for the first time in the current fiscal, government data showed.

GST Network (GSTN) saw an even bigger surge in return-filing in September as the extended deadlines for previous months came to a close. Over 1.68 crore returns were filed in September, an increase of more than 88% over last year.

Over 1.3 crore taxpayers are registered with GST but about 17 lakh are composition taxpayers which are required to file a separate quarterly return while the rest file GSTR-3B monthly.

“It has been made possible as the GST infrastructure has been upgraded to handle up to 3 lakh concurrent logged-in users at a time,” the government said referring to the increased load on the GSTN system. The system is also capable to handling 5 lakh concurrent users if required, it said.

GSTN’s capacity was enhanced from 1.5 lakh concurrent users in June in anticipation of a surge of tax returns owing to the pandemic and subsequent deferrals in the original deadlines.

“Taking the surge during the peak filing into consideration, GSTN also took on the performance and stress testing of system applications that helped identify and remove bottlenecks in the software,” the government said. It added that GSTN performed removal of redundant processing required of taxpayer requests, optimised taxpayer workload management by creating distinct processing pipelines depending upon the size of taxpayer’s upload of invoice data, tuning system and database parameters among other steps.