Currently, businesses upload such invoices on Invoice Registration Portal (IRP) on the current date, irrespective of the date of issue of such invoice.

While issuing an advisory to the taxpayers, GST Network (GSTN) said the government has decided to impose a time limit on reporting old invoices on the e-invoice IRP portals for taxpayers with aggregate annual turnover greater than or equal to ₹100 crore.

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As per GSTN, "To ensure timely compliance, taxpayers in this category will not be allowed to report invoices older than 7 days on the date of reporting." In order to provide sufficient time for taxpayers to comply with this requirement, this new format would be implemented from May 1, 2023.

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This restriction will apply to invoice, and there will be no time restriction on reporting debit/credit notes, it added. 

Further giving example, the GSTN said if an invoice has a date of April 1, 2023, it cannot be reported after April 8, 2023. The validation system built into the invoice registration portal will disallow the user from reporting the invoice after the 7-day window. Hence, it is essential for taxpayers to ensure that they report the invoice within the 7-day window provided by the new time limit, the GSTN said.

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As per GST law, businesses cannot avail input tax credit (ITC) if invoices are not uploaded on the IRP. 

AMRG & Associates Senior Partner Rajat Mohan said this technological change would arrest backdating of e-invoices by large companies. "After successfully implementing this for large taxpayers, government is expected to roll out these changes for all taxpayers in a phased manner," Mohan told PTI.

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Currently, businesses with turnover of ₹10 crore and above are required to generate electronic invoice for all B2B transactions.

Under Goods and Services Tax (GST) law, e-invoicing for business-to-business (B2B) transactions was made mandatory for companies with turnover of over ₹500 crore from October 1, 2020, which was then extended to those with turnover of over ₹100 crore effective January 1, 2021.

From April 1, 2021, companies with turnover of over ₹50 crore were generating B2B e-invoices, and the threshold was brought down to ₹20 crore beginning April 1, 2022. From October 1, 2022, the threshold was further lowered to ₹10 crore.

EY Tax Partner Saurabh Agarwal told PTI that implementation of timelines for reporting invoices on IRP would help in administering compliances and is an another great move towards digitalisation.

"This may also aid in increasing the GST collection once the said limit of ₹100 crore turnover is reduced significantly or is made mandatory for all assesses required to generate IRN (Invoice Registration Number)," Agarwal said.

Meanwhile, GST evasion detection by tax officers almost doubled year-on-year to over ₹1.01 lakh crore in the just concluded 2022-23 fiscal, an official told PTI. During the last fiscal, a recovery of ₹21,000 crore was made by the officers of the Directorate General of GST Intelligence (DGGI). The official said the government is taking steps to increase compliance and using data analytics and human intelligence to identify fraud. "DGGI officers have detected evasion to the tune of ₹1,01,300 crore in 2022-23. Of this, recovery of ₹21,000 crore have been made," the official told PTI. In 2021-22, DGGI, the investigative agency under the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime, detected evasion of over ₹54,000 crore and made a tax recovery of over ₹21,000 crore.

The total number of Goods and Services Tax (GST) evasion cases has gone up this fiscal with about 14,000 cases detected in 2022-23, up from 12,574 cases in 2021-22 and 12,596 cases in 2020-21.