Should bloggers register for GST

Let’s examine whether GST is applicable for bloggers.

Bloggers earn revenue from ads placed on their website. In the general course of the business, advertising is taxable and tax dues of the GST Act will be taxed.

blogger

The person who displays and demands advertisements in a medium will be the recipient of the services and the distributor will be the person who publishes the ad in advertising / TV / Radio / Print. Say that a television channel shows ads for a toothpaste company. So the TV service is a service distribution and a toothpaste company. The TV channel will raise an invoice in a toothpaste company and buy GTT.

However, in the case of a blog, there are certain aspects to consider:

Is Blogger Distributor? Bloggers provide internet real estate for companies to host their ad. There is a service supply. So Blogger is a distributor.

Who is the receiver? When payments are made to Google Payments, the Clearinghouse works because Google will pay directly to the paid companies. Hosted advertising these companies do not directly interact with the blogger. Blogger does not know exactly how much money was to be charged on these blogs.

Do you know Blogger about GSTIN or other details of companies that place ads on the blog? Here Blogger interacts with Google Ads. He does not know what ads were placed on his website. Who should give those ads? Are these companies registered under GST? Blogger needs to raise an invoice for anyone.

Who gives payments to blog?

Bloggers payments through Google AdSense based on the traffic and ads on the blog. Even though acting as a distributor, Blogger did not raise an invoice. In the meantime, Google charges the companies for the ads they make. So there is no direct connection between the issuer and the receiver.

Google will not accept a distributor or advertising service.

When various aspects of the GST Act are addressed, such a setup is not addressed separately. Until further clarification, we ask bloggers to avoid unnecessary concerns about whether to register or not. We will post our readers if the government announces the changes. This has been referenced by our readers. However, we do not believe that registering is needed immediately, there is not enough specification based on the above points.

Counter Vision

All the discussions below are just a concept. Because the GTA Act does not have sufficient clarity about whether or not the bloggers need to register.

This scenario may only change the variation on a report/statement made by Google to be invoked by Google to the extent that Google decides invoice for the advertiser. The transaction may be broken in two stages. [Note: This is just a hypothesis, there is no need for GST to make these transactions disappear].

  • Transaction 1-> Google (Distributor), Advertiser (Ticket)
  • Transaction 2- 2- Blogger (Distributor), Google (Recipient)

You can raise an invoice, it is important to identify where the service is.

Distributor of India and the recipient

The advertising company provides India-based and invoicing information from Google India

– Where IGST is charged where advertisers and Google are based on different states.

– SGST + CGST advertiser and Google will be placed at the same level.

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2 years of Demonetisation

5 trends that defined India’s digital payments industry 

Two years ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi put the entire nation in a frenzy. In one stroke, the government made Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denomination notes invalid, leaving the country of 1.3 billion in a limbo.

As citizens queued up outside banks to deposit old currency notes in exchange for new ones, the digital payments ecosystem saw a huge opportunity to open up. Right after the prime minister announced the ban on high-value currency notes.

And they did!

Two years later,

All payment and settlement systems – NEFT, IMPS, UPI, NACH, card payments, Electronic Clearing Systems as well as Forex and market clearing systems – have seen a 44.6 per cent increase in volume in 2017-18 and an 11.9 percent increase in the value of funds transferred.

In the annual report, RBI also said that during the financial year 2016-17, the volume of transactions through digital payment systems witnessed a 56 per cent increase, with the value of funds increasing by 24.8 per cent.

Transactions across the digital retail payment infrastructure, which includes card payments, UPI and others increased to 92.6 per cent in 2017-18, up from 88.9 per cent in the previous year. [Report here]

The RBI also said the share of paper-based clearing instruments reduced from 11.1 per cent in 2016-17 to 7.4 per cent in 2017-18, showing a strong trend in favour of digital payments.

The growth of debit cards stalled after Demonetisation 

From FY16 to FY17, the total number of credit and debit cards grew by almost 29 per cent, but this trend didn’t quite sustain in the next financial year. Card growth fell sharply in FY18, growing at 1.5 per cent, with total physical cards in the country standing at almost 900 million.

This can be attributed to the slow growth of debit cards post demonetisation, which showed less than 1 per cent growth between FY17 and FY18. Credit cards maintained an average 20 per cent increase year-on-year.

Debit card growth in the country is now back on track, having grown 13.6 per cent as of August this financial year. As of August 2018, there were a total of 1.02 billion credit and debit cards in the country.

Acceptance of digital infrastructure   

Acceptance of digital infrastructure has grown since demonetisation with the number of Point of Sale (POS) terminals increasing by 24 per cent from 2.53 million in 2016-17 to 3.08 million in 2017-18, according to the RBI. During the same period, the number of ATMs deployed by banks witnessed a marginal decline from 222,475 to 222,247.

The digital infrastructure still needs to expand as currently, for a total 1.02 billion credit and debit cards in the country, there are only 3.3 million PoS devices and only 228,422 ATMs.

That means for every 309 million cards in the country there is one PoS machine available as an acceptance point.

UPI – the real winner

When it comes to digital payments, Unified Payments Interface has been the real winner.

Despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi pushing digital payments app BHIM which runs on the UPI infrastructure, the total volume of UPI payments stood at 17.9 million in FY17. And the value of funds transferred for the same period, stood at Rs 6,900 crore, according to the RBI.

In 2017-18, after the adoption of UPI by private players like Google, Paytm and others, the total number of transactions skyrocketed by more than 5,000 per cent. In FY18, the total number of UPI transactions stood at 915.2 million and total funds transferred on the service stood at Rs 1.09 lakh crore.

Within eight months of this year, according to data from National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), UPI transactions in the country have already crossed the 2 billion mark with a total Rs 3.42 lakh crore being transferred.

Content credit: Your Story

Who gets more amounts of tax?

Who gets more amounts of tax, the central or the state government?

The central government gets more tax than the state government. The tax collection of the central government is vast. It gets taxes from all states but the state gets tax only from its territory.

Central or State Government

For example, we are paying GST 18% where the state government gets 9% and the central government gets 9%. Multiply it into all states, you will get the desired result.

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