The finance leader.
And the regulator.
For the first time.
"Nine years in, and the question has completely changed."
Sunil Kumar has spent almost a decade running finance inside one of India's most operationally complex retail enterprises. Multi-state. Multi-category. Thousands of transactions every day.
His take on what broke, what got fixed, and what every CFO still gets wrong about GST compliance, in his own words.
— Sunil Kumar, General Manager – Finance, Joyalukkas
Inside the report, Sunil unpacks:
- ›Why the real cost of getting ITC right is a number most finance leaders haven't put on a slide yet
- ›The audit tail, and why rate reinterpretations arriving three to five years after filing are the single biggest unmodelled risk on an enterprise balance sheet
- ›The only real defence at the point of filing, and what it actually takes to build it
- ›The one technology that has genuinely moved the needle (and what it hasn't solved)
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"GST compliance is the ECG of your business. And the machine is always running."
For the first time in an enterprise CFO report, the view from the other side of the return.
Dr. Kotraswamy M., IRS, Commissioner, CGST Bengaluru North, on what the regulator actually expects from India's largest enterprises in 2026, and why most finance teams haven't caught up.
— Dr. Kotraswamy M., Commissioner, CGST Bengaluru North Commissionerate
What you'll read in this section:
- ›Why non-compliance is no longer a legal risk, it is a cost-of-capital risk
- ›How your GST compliance score is already being read by your NBFCs, banks and invoice discounting platforms, before you've asked for the credit line
- ›Why, for listed entities, a show-cause notice no longer stays inside the tax department, and who reads it first
- ›What the government's actual expectation is, and why enterprises treating GST as a strategic priority today are quietly building a competitive edge others will struggle to close