For existing registrants who are either registered with States or with the Centre or with both, the system shall be designed to migrate the cleaned and verified data from the existing database to the GST Common Portal and a GSTIN shall be generated. With regard to the migration of data of the existing registrants, following steps are necessary:

1. The process of migration of data must be started sufficiently in advance so that the business of existing registrants does not suffer and transition from the present system to GST is smooth.

2. At present, tax payers are separately registered with State and/ or with Central tax administrations or with both based on their business activity. In the GST regime, a taxpayer will have to obtain State wise registration. Even within a State, the taxpayer may either opt for a single registration or multiple registrations for different business verticals.

3. Analysis of registration data available with States and Centre conducted by NSDL and GSTN reveals the following:

a. The numbers of fields in the registration database of various State VAT and CBEC system are different than that finalized for GST. The number of fields varies from 50 to 107 in case of States/Centre whereas GST Registration Form has 120 fields. Thus there is a gap of 13 to 70 fields, meaning that data will have to be collected from the taxpayers.

b. As per report of NSDL, which conducted “as is study” of State Systems as well as that of CBEC, in majority of cases, the available data does not comply with Metadata and Data Standards (MDDS) of Government of India. This is also confirmed by the feedback received from States in May 2015. Importing such data, which is not MDDS compliant, will lead to wrong or incomplete results on query.

c. The data from States also shows that they do not have scanned copies of supporting documents for mandatory fields like principle place of business, photos of MD or Karta etc. in their database. This again will have to be collected from them.

Since, lots of reports will be using registration database, purity of registration data will be of paramount importance. Migrating half-complete and incorrect data from existing registration databases to GST database will adversely impact the reports and intelligence derived out of it. Thus data will have to be collected afresh from the existing taxpayers. GSTIN can be issued based on State and validated PAN. In case of taxpayers under Excise and VAT, source of data for issuing GSTIN should be VAT data as in most cases Excise assesse will also be registered under VAT. For taxpayers under Service Tax the source of data for issuing GSTIN should be Service Tax.

Out of six mandatory data fields in the GST Registration field, three can be filled up from validated PAN data, namely PAN, name of business, constitution of business. The name of State is known in case of VAT data. The remaining two mandatory data fields namely ‘Principal Place of Business’ and ‘details of promoters’ will have to be collected from taxpayers along with non-mandatory items. In case of Service Tax, State will have to be collected before generating GSTIN. With this the following process has been suggested:

For Taxpayers Registered under State VAT/Excise

1. GSTIN will be generated by NSDL in case of all VAT TINs where PAN has been validated on provisional basis. Along with a password the GSTIN will be sent to respective State Tax Authorities.

2. State tax authorities will communicate the GSTIN/password to taxpayers, with instruction to log on the GST portal and fill up the remaining data. State specific data over and above what is contained in the GST Registration Form can be collected after GST registration becomes operational.

3. The data so collected by GSTN/NSDL will be provided to States so that they can undertake the verification exercise as per their convenience in a staggered manner spread over a period of one to two quarters so that it does affect the working of the tax authorities. This is being suggested as the dealer is already registered with VAT department.

4. In case, PAN has been validated but the email or mobile numbers of dealers are not available, such dealers may be advised through newspaper advertisement to visit the GST portal and use the following data for user authentication:

a. VAT-TIN

b. PAN

c. Date of Birth/Date of Incorporation in DDMMYYYY format. (This data is available with PAN Database)

d. Date of birth of proprietor in case of Proprietorship firm.

e. Date of incorporation in case of all other types of dealers.

f. In those cases where PAN has not been validated, State VAT department will have to collect the taxpayers.

For Taxpayers Registered under Service Tax

For the taxpayers who are not registered under a State, a different approach will have to be adopted.

1. Since all Service Taxpayers have user ID and password and Service Tax has their email IDs, they may advice the taxpayers to intimate State(s) where they would like to get themselves registered in.

2. Service Tax portal will check from GST portal whether GSTIN has been generated for combination of State and PAN of the taxpayer. If not generated, request GST portal to generate the same.

3. GST portal will generate the GSTIN and communicate to Service Tax, which will be communicated to the taxpayer asking him/her to provide remaining data at GST Portal.

Any verification / updation of the information as outlined above would have to be done by the taxable person within a specified period.

If the verification/updation is not done within the stipulated period, the GSTIN will be suspended till the taxable person does the needful.

Any verification by State / Central authorities can be done after GSTIN is issued.