All about Know Your Supplier (KYS) Facility

1. What is ‘Know Your Supplier’ facility?

The new facility called ‘Know Your Supplier’ (KYS) was introduced to enable every registered person to obtain some basic information about their suppliers. The suppliers can be either with whom they conduct or propose to do business in future.

2. How did ‘Know Your Supplier’ facility emerge?’

The government previously wanted to implement the compliance rating system that gives a rating to the suppliers based on their accuracy in invoice uploading, regularity in return filing and compliance with the other law requirements.

This rating system needs a separate mechanism to be established by the government. The government believes that it is better to provide suppliers with information to the recipients so that they can make the best assessment of the suppliers before continuing to do business with them.

At the press meet after the 39th GST Council meeting, the Hon’ble Union Finance Minister explained that this facility was inspired by the ‘Know Your Customer’ (KYC) scheme. The KYC is a process where banks collect proofs to identify the existence and genuineness of their customers.

3. How to avail the ‘Know Your Supplier’ facility?

This facility might be made available to the taxpayer only after he logs into the GST portal. This facility provides information about the existing suppliers as well as the proposed suppliers. A user may be able to enter the GSTIN of the supplier available on his record to fetch further details about the regularity of GSTR-1 filing and so on. However, further details about the functionality are yet to be notified as on 16th March 2020.

The taxpayer can get access to the authorised information submitted by suppliers at the time of GST registration or at the time of amendments to their GST registration.

4. When will ’Know Your Supplier facility’ launch?

The KYS facility will launch soon. As of 16 March 2020, the date of the launch is not notified yet by the Council.

5. What are the uses of ‘Know Your Supplier’ facility?

1. This facility might work as an information exchange module between the recipient and supplier.
2. This facility will help in reducing the non-compliance by the suppliers.
3. Once this facility is made available, the taxpayers can get some basic information about the exisiting suppliers with whom they are doing business.
4. Also, the taxpayer can get to know about a new supplier, once he goes through the supplier’s history regarding compliance with the law.