The paper — titled Fixing the GST Process: Five Years of Iterative Problem Solving — further said that while the GST regime began with 38 lakh taxpayers on July 1, 2017, it saw a steady increase and climbed to 1.12 crore taxpayers by June 2018. “At the time of publication, there were 1.37 crore taxpayers, with a peak count of nearly 1.42 crore in the last quarter of 2022,” the paper said.