October GST collections cross Rs 1 lakh crore

New Delhi: Revenue collection under the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime crossed the Rs 1 lakh crore mark in October, a marked increase from Rs 94,442 crore in September, the government announced on Thursday.

The total GST revenue collected in October (for September) stood at Rs 1,00,710 crore, it said. 

The only other time the GST collections had crossed the Rs 1 lakh crore mark was in April (for the month of March) when it was attributed to it being the last month of the financial year when collections are usually high "as people also try to pay arrears of some previous months".

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley attributed the rise in the tax mop-up in October to lower tax rates and higher compliance.

"GST collections for October 2018 have crossed Rs 1 lakh crore. The success of GST is lower rates, lesser evasion, higher compliance, only one tax and negligible interference by taxation authorities," he tweeted.

The government said that out of the total GST revenue, Rs 16,464 crore was collected as Central-GST (CGST), Rs 22,826 crore as State-GST (SGST), Rs 53,419 crore as Integrated-GST (IGST) and Rs 8,000 crore as cess.

"The government has settled Rs 17,490 crore to CGST and Rs 15,107 crore to SGST from IGST as regular settlement. Further, Rs 30,000 crore has been settled from the balance IGST available with the Centre on provisional basis in the ratio of 50:50 between Centre and states," it said in a statement. 

After the regular and provisional settlement, the Central government's revenue stood at Rs 48,954 crore and the state governments' at Rs 52,934 crore.

"The states which achieved extra-ordinary growth in total taxes collected include Kerala (44 per cent), Jharkhand (20 per cent), Rajasthan (14 per cent), Uttarakhand (13 per cent) and Maharashtra (11 per cent)," the statement added.