Referring to the delays taking place in the GST Council meetings called to finalise the nitty-gritty of the upcoming tax regime, senior Minister with the State Government Saryu Roy has said that recent demonetisation move was going to complicate things even further, particularly for the obstructionists.
Speaking at a national conference organised over GST by industry conglomerate Assocham on Monday, Roy, however, stressed that the Centre may have to resort to toughness in order to make it happen ahead of the deadline set.
“The Central Government is willing to take all the States together in this journey of uniform tax regime and wishes that all the States carve out the structure prerequisite at their level. But what we find that consensus is not there. States like Tamil Nadu and West Bengal have made it an ego issue. And recent decision of demonetisation has given new twists to the opposition. Slump in business and tax collection in some sense is said to have changed the situation from then to now,” said Roy.
His remarks hold importance in the light of cutting short the two-day meeting called by the Centre last week on this very issue and fixing a new date later on December 23-24 to deal with the objections coming from few States over revenue sharing pattern and others.
As per the plan, all the issues are needed to addressed before the next Session of Parliament where the laws relating to Central, State, Integrated GST would be placed to be passed. Following that the State Assemblies would deliberate and ratify the S-GST and that also before April 1, 2017, the deadline set for rolling out the new tax regime across the country as of now.
Roy, at the same time, also lobbed suggestion to the Centre to go diplomatic while handing the States. “The Centre needs to go soft and diplomatic in convincing the disconcerting States in order to bring them on the same page. GST is for better future with lots of tax reforms. It would increase revenue collection with least possibility of malpractice and manipulations. States like Jharkhand which is largely a consumer State would be benefited. But before that the GST Council has to remove some of the apprehensions and doubts in their minds,” added the Minister.
Rules and guidelines, tax slabs and sharing pattern have to be ratified by the GST Council where all the States are represented. Moreover, the Centre is looking confident about this with majority of the States consenting but Roy even advocated going tough on dissenting States, if required.
Also present on the occasion was Commissioner of Custom, Central Excise and Service Tax in Jharkhand Ranjan Kumar Sahoo who termed the new regime a win-win situation for the State.
“It is to set up a single market across the country and States like Jharkhand which is largely a consuming State would be greatly benefited by this. Also, since there is no concept of centralised registration, it would force companies or firm functioning here to register here itself. Increased share of service tax would raise State’s revenue,” said the official. Assocham’s chairman for ‘Jharkhand Start-up Council’ Rajeev Gupta stressed over greater level of awareness before the GST being rolled out.