Haryana Vidhan Sabha on Thursday passed the Goods and Services Tax Bill 2017.
Prior to Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Telangana, Bihar, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh have passed the GST bill.
The GST Bill was introduced in the Haryana Assembly by the State's Finance Minister Capt. Abhimanyu ensued by about an hour long debate, which saw the participation of Congress MlA Karan Singh Dalal and INlD’s Parminder Dhull.
During the one-day special session of Haryana Vidhan Sabha convened for passing the GST Bill, the Finance Minister said that the GST would take the feature of Value Added Tax (VAT) from State boundaries to national level. GST is a destination-based tax. The threshold limit under GST has been fixed at Rs 20 lakh which is currently Rs 5 lakh in Haryana, he said
On the concerns raised by Congress MlA Karan Dalal that Haryana is not prepared for GST implementation, Capt. Abhimanyu said that Haryana is fully geared up for ushering in the Goods and Services Tax regime.
Be it creating the much needed IT infrastructure, meeting Network requirements and training staff at different levels for a successful roll-out, the State is all done and ready. So much so, necessary integration with GSTN has also been completed and tested, said he.
The Excise and Taxation Minister, Capt Abhimanyu also said being a model A State, Haryana was engaged in developing own application for backend processes and host them. States for which GSTN will develop application for backend processes and host them, are called Model B States.
So far, all Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) released by GSTN have been successfully tested. The SRS (Software Requirements Specifications) for core backend applications, namely registration and payments, have been prepared and the development is in progress, he added.
Replying to the queries of opposition on benefits of GST to Haryana, the Minister said the State is expected to get Rs 7,300 crore service tax after the implementation of GST.
The States having growth rate lower than 14 per cent would be compensated by the Centre. The base year for calculating the revenue of a State would be 2015-16 and economic growth rate of 14 per cent would be considered for calculating the likely revenue of each state in the first five years of implementation of the GST, said the Minister.
With the one nation-one tax mechanism, the Minister said that better management of inflation could also be ensured in the country. The GST shall be levied on a common base of taxpayers both by Centre and States. The rate structure on each supply of goods and services shall remain uniform across States and the list of exempted supplies of goods and services shall also be same, he added.
Capt Abhimanyu hailed the Goods and Services Tax as a path-breaking reform in taxation history which will knit the entire country into a single market by ironing out distortions, put an end to skewed and dissimilar tax practices, and make the going for trade and industry a lot easier.
He said the new tax would subsume 17 different types of indirect taxes of Centre and States and do away with multiplicity of taxes.
Responding to a query related to paying tax under GST regime, he said that the structure of GST has been such that all GST related services to all taxpayers shall be available on a common GST portal though the tax shall be paid under three different Acts namely State GST, Centre GST and IGST.
The taxpayers shall have to file only one return. All the returns shall be filed online on the same common GST portal. The reconciliation and verification of each inward supply with the corresponding outward supply and input tax credit shall be made by the system automatically without any human intervention, he added.