GST Suvidha Provider

Background

The Goods and Services Tax constitutional amendment having been promulgated by the Govt of India, the rollout of the GST Bill will be a collective effort of the Central and State Governments, the tax payers and the IT platform provider i.e. Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN), Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC) and State Tax Departments. Besides these main participants there are going to be other stakeholders.

The GST System can be accessed by taxpayers through a Government to Business (G2B) portal. However, there will be a wide variety of tax payers (SME, Large Enterprise, Small retail vendor etc.) who will require different kind of facilities like converting their purchase/sales register data in GST compliant format, integration of their Accounting Packages/ERP with GST System. GST Suvidha Provider (GSP) is hence an ecosystem of Service Providers created by the GSTN to provide innovative solutions (Portal, Mobile App, Enriched API) either themselves or through its third party partners for making tax filing more easy and convenient to tax payers.

Who Can Become a GSP?

The organisations and entities who are expected to sign up as GSPs are visualised to be as under:

• Registered companies in India in the IT / ITES / BFSI domain.
• The prospective applicant for GSP will need to meet a pre-qualification criteria for GSPs.
• GSPs who meet the pre-qualification criteria will sign a contract with GSTN to become an authorised GSP.
• This draft contract has the following content:

1. Definitions, responsibilities of GSPs and their legal obligations as well as liabilities.
2. Technical architectural framework as to how GSPs shall integrate with GST System.
3. Commercial terms and conditions along with SLAs to be met.

On signing of the contract, GSPs will get a unique license key for accessing the GST system. GSPs will be authenticated using this license key (Client id + Client Secret) provided by GSTN. GSP will have a provision to generate multiple License keys as per its need.

Existing GSPs

GSTN has on-boarded GSPs on the basis a selection process that involved evaluating their financial ability and IT capability to deliver the necessary services to tax payers for becoming GST compliant in the new GST regime. Businesses may avail of the services of the GSP as per their need.To access the list of existing GSPs, click here.

Utility model of GSPs

The GSPs are free to charge the tax payers depending on the services they offer to the tax payers. Agreements between tax payers and GSPs shall be decided by them exclusively. GSTN will not have any lien on them.

Do Taxpayers mandatorily need services of GSP or ASP under GST?

For the convenience of taxpayers, GSTN has come-up with an Offline Tool where data on invoices (business to business), exports, supplies to consumers etc., which are required to create GSTR-1 (Outward Supply Return), can be entered in an excel sheet in offline mode (without being connected to Internet). At desired interval, the tool can be run to upload all such data on the portal. Only while uploading the data on GST portal, Internet connectivity will be required. The Offline tool will be provided free of cost and taxpayers will be able to download it from the GST portal from last week of June. GSTN will release the format of Excel in which businesses will start maintaining the data from 1st of July for using the free offline tool for uploading the invoice data and other return data.

Taxpayers using offline tool will not require services of any GSP. Similarly those having small number of business to business invoices, like retailers and small traders, can do the data entry on portal itself and they will also not require the services of GSPs.

Source : GSP portal