Rs 25000 crore refund pending claims pending for exporters: Amit Mitra

Around Rs 25,000 crore refund is pending for the exporters while more than 3 lakhs applications seeking refunds have piled up with the central government, said West Bengal Finance Minister and former chairman of the empowered committee on GST, Amit Mitra. Adding that he would raise the issue in the next GST council meeting, Mitra said, the exporters are suffering hugely for this. The exporters are not getting refund and that is why they are losing out on their working capital which adversely affects the job of the field workers, added Mitra.

“We had repeatedly appealed to the GST council and raised this issue in the meeting. There should be auto-verification for the documents and tax papers. Almost 11 months have passed since the implementation of GST; but the auto verification process could not be implemented. The GSTN has been programmed in such a way that it can only take the first step and last step online and all in between processes are being done manually. It appears that we have gone back to the tedious process of manual verification of documents and determining the correctness of each and every filing. This is the reason for this huge delay in giving refund to the exporters,” the state finance and industry minister said on Monday in Kolkata after attending a programme for the promotion of exports from West Bengal.

Mitra has assured the exporters that he would write to the chairman of the GST council and the union finance minister, Arun Jaitley elaborating on the problems which are being faced by the exporters. He further added that only 35% of these 3 lakh pending applications have come back to the respective states for physical verification while refund claim applications are piling up every day.