Commerce and Industry Minister Suresh Prabhu has urged the Finance Ministry to make the process of refund of Goods and Services Tax (GST) input tax credit online to ensure that the export refund is seamless and also transparent and accountable. He also highlighted the declining trend of export credit in recent months and suggested that banks may be asked to encourage flow of credit to the export sector particularly to Micro- Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) for generating more employment.
Besides, representatives of the export sector highlighted the problems of pre-import under advance authorisation and requested the Commerce Minister to bring the notification deleting the condition with retrospective effect. Suresh Prabhu asked DGFT and Department of Revenue, Ministry of Finance, to look into it so that genuine exporters are not harassed. Prabhu presided over a meeting of government officials and export organisations to discuss problems faced by the export sector. Banking issues, like caution listing of exporters, third party/ third country exports and list of items to be traded with Iran, were also discussed. The finance ministry officials would discuss the issues which were flagged in a meeting with banks on January 22.
As of November-end, total GST refunds to the tune of Rs 91,149 crore has been cleared by the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) and the state authorities out of the total refund claims of Rs 97,202 crore received so far. Thus, the disposal rate of 93.77 percent has been achieved. While Integrated GST (IGST) refund process is online, claiming of ITC refund still requires manual intervention.