The pace of filing goods and services tax (GST) returns under sales, or GSTR1, nosedived on Saturday evening, when the Council in the meeting in Hyderabad decided to give businesses another month till October 10 to do so.About less than half the expected returns in July had been filed by the earlier deadline of Sunday. The traffic on the GST Network (GSTN) portal on Saturday declined significantly from 80,000 users an hour to just 17,000 after Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced the extension.As of Tuesday, about 2.8 million GSTR1 returns were filed. This is out of the 5.95 million registered taxpayers for July.“The pace of filing was robust till the announcement of the extension. It was a steep decline from that hour. This speaks a lot about the mentality to defer things till the last day,” said a government official.