Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council meeting is scheduled on Friday and is likely to resolve the difficulties faced by traders under the new tax regime.
New Delhi : Businesses across the country are keeping a hopeful eye on what is in store on Friday for them in the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council meeting here to resolve their grievances on the new unified indirect national tax brought into force from July 1 superseding a plethora of national and state taxes.
As chairman of the council, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will push for relaxing the GST return filing timeline from one month to quarterly every three months for small and medium businesses with annual turnover of less than Rs 1.5 crore, defer reverse charge mechanism and reopen registration for composite scheme for the third time till March 31, 2018.
Almost 1.5 crore businesses, comprising 65% of the total taxpayers, will benefit from quarterly filing of returns. Currently, all those registered under GST are bound to file three monthly returns, in addition to one annual return. They actually file two returns while the third is populated from the figures in these returns. The businesses are facing hardship since they have to fill all data online instead of uploading ready data and there is no provision for one to keep a copy of the forms filled up nor a provision to file corrections in the returns.
The finance ministry sources said Jaitley may also ask the council to defer at least for some time the reverse charge mechanism (RCM), that has been especially bothering the small tax payers. Reverse charge is a mechanism under which the recipient of the good or service will have to pay GST, which is otherwise paid by the supplier. The charge is applicable on a registered dealer, if he buys goods from a dealer not registered under GST. However, the receiver of the goods is eligible for input tax credit, while the unregistered dealer is not. There are large number of complaints of glitches in the information technology (IT) portal GST Network (GSTN), but the finance ministry sources claimed these are only the initial hiccups in adjusting to the new system as otherwise lakhs of businesses would not have succeeded in putting their tax data on the network.
