PunjabDeputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Badal’s assurance of clearing the pending VAT (value added tax) refund cases within three month’s time has failed to find favour with the traders’ community.
Up in arms against the State Government, more than 100 trade and industry associations on Wednesday protested against the State’s ruling alliance demanding their pending VAT refund and advance-tax rollback.
The protesters, after gathering at Company Bagh Chowk, marched in a procession to BMC Chowk where they demonstrated outside the excise and sales tax office carrying placards written — “Vyapar nahin to sarkar nahin(no trade, no government)”, “VAT refund: Sadda paisa vapas karo (pay back our money)” on it.
“The VAT refund issue is long pending but except for assurance from the Deputy Chief Minister, we have received nothing,” said Federation of Jalandhar Industrial and Traders’ Associations president Gursharan Singh, while addressing the protesters. Deputy Chief Minister had agreed to solve the matter before September 15, still Rs 30 crore of VAT refund of Jalandhar industrialists was due, he added. Condemning the state government for imposing advance tax, he said that it was a new name for entry tax that had been abolished by court’s order. “Industry, in acute financial crisis already, can take no further burden,” he said, adding that even “the Excise and Taxation Department harasses traders and blocks taxpayer identification number (TIN) without valid reason”.
Only couple of days before, deputy Chief Minister had announced to set up a dedicated corpus — Punjab VAT Refund Fund — to be maintained by the Excise and Taxation Department in order to permanently resolve the problem of VAT refunds being faced by Punjab industrialists.
He had maintained that the entire collections as advance tax will go to this Corpus, and would be used to clear VAT refunds first and in case any funds are left in the Corpus, they will be transferred to the Consolidated Fund of the State.