New Delhi: India’s Goods and Services Tax (GST) revenues in January 2023 touched nearly ₹1.56 lakh crore by Tuesday evening, marking the second-highest monthly collections recorded since the launch of the indirect tax regime in July 2017.

January’s GST kitty, which is likely to be revised upwards, is 10.6% higher than a year ago and 4.3% over December’s collections, marking the 11th month in a row that revenues were over ₹1.4 lakh crore. The highest revenues so far under the GST system were recorded in April 2022, when tax inflows were ₹1,67,540 crore.

For the first ten months of 2022-23, GST revenues are now 24% higher than a year ago, with goods imports yielding 29% more GST revenue and domestic transactions (including import of services) rising 22%.

“This is for the third time in the current financial year, GST collection has crossed the ₹1.50 lakh crore mark,” the Finance Ministry said, adding that e-way bills generated during December 2022, to which January’s revenues pertain, hit a record 8.3 crore, ‘significantly higher’ than the 7.9 crore e-way bills generated a month earlier.

The ministry attributed the numbers to “various policy changes introduced during the course of the year to improve compliance”, noting that the number of people filing GST returns has improved significantly over the years.

“In the quarter October-December 2022, total 2.42 crore GST returns were filed till end of next month as compared to 2.19 crore in the same quarter in the last year,” it said.

Gross GST revenues collected in January till 5 p.m. on Tuesday stood at ₹1,55,922 crore, of which Central GST accounted for ₹28,963 crore, State GST for ₹36,730 crore, and Integrated GST of ₹79,599 crore (including ₹37,118 crore collected on import of goods). GST Compensation Cess yielded ₹10,630 crore, including ₹768 crore on import of goods.

“The Government has settled ₹38,507 crore to Central GST (CGST) and ₹32,624 crore to State GST (SGST) from the Integrated GST as regular settlement. The total revenue of Centre and the States in the month of January 2023 after regular settlement is ₹67,470 crore for CGST and ₹69,354 crore for the SGST,” the Ministry said.

“With the Economic Survey 22-23 indicating that the taxpayer numbers have almost doubled from the initial 2017 numbers, it seems that such high GST collections can be expected to be normal for the coming months,” said Abhishek Jain, partner indirect tax at KPMG.