ARN not mandatory for doing business, GSTIN sufficient: Navin Kumar

NEW DELHI: Application Reference Number (ARN) should not be considered mandatory by businesses for buying goods from vendors, GST Network said today.

Application Reference Number (ARN) is an acknowledgement issued by GSTN system portal to the taxpayers who have successfully submitted their application after completing the full process.

It has come to notice that some of the taxpayers have made ARN mandatory for buying things from their vendors. It has also been reported that few tax accounting software companies have made reporting of ARN mandatory in their accounting software.

GSTN Chairman Navin Kumar said ARN quoting is restricting large number of taxpayers in conducting their day-to-day business activities and instead provisional ID should be sufficient for doing business.

"Making ARN mandatory will debar large number of taxpayers who have not completed Part-B of enrolment form, for which they have 3 months' time from July 1, 2017. Also, ARN has no significance under GST Law. All taxpayers are therefore advised not to insist on ARN," Kumar said in a statement.

When a business registers under GST, it is given a provisional GSTIN. After that, in the second stage, the business has to log in to the GSTN portal and give details of its business like the main place of business, additional place, directors and bank account details.

Kumar said provisional IDs or GSTINs given to the enrolled taxpayers and the same could be used for business transactions.

Taxpayers with activated GSTN profiles still have time till September 30 to complete the enrolment process, he said.

Under the GST Law, all taxpayers registered under earlier Acts subsumed under GST and having valid PAN are to be given provisional certificate of registration.

So far 66.7 lakh taxpayers have activated their Provisional IDs and the Provisional Certificate has been generated for them.