Slating revolution in the history of Indian economics, India celebrates the first birthday of “Goods and Service Tax”

New Delhi, July 2: Many reforms lined in these four years of Modi government, there have been many first timers that the country did not witness and actually never thought this would turn out to be a success. One such revolution was made by the Goods and Service Tax. A ‘good and simple tax’ is how Prime Minister Narendra Modi described the goods and services tax (GST).

 

By giving people a door to enter a more eased out and tax-free country. A very Happy Birthday to Goods and Service Tax to enable a free and fair country that India aims to be. Its rollout, a year ago, has enhanced the ease of doing business by creating a common platform across the country for registration, duty payments, the filing of returns and refund of taxes.

GST is a landmark reform that has transformed the nation into an economic union with the motto ‘ONE NATION, ONE TAX, ONE MARKET’. No other nation in the world, with so many regional socio-economic and political interests, has been able to implement such a tax reform ever in the history

The government’s indirect tax department has identified “thousands of crore rupees” in tax leakage as it strengthens its data analytics capabilities after a year of goods and services tax (GST) implementation. Owing to the positive framework of the tax policy, GST has eased the way of doing business and become a more tax complainant society.

Celebrating its first anniversary, the event commemorated by addressing the eventful 1year journey of GST over a live video link by Union Minister, Arun Jaitley. Union Minister for Railways, Coal, Finance & Corporate Affairs, Piyush Goyal presided over as the Chief Guest of the event and Minister of State for Finance, Shiv Pratap Shukla was the Guest of Honour.

Arun Jaitley recalled the pre-GST taxation system in India was one of the most complicated tax systems in the world. Multiple taxes, multiple returns to be filed by assesses, interface with multiple tax authorities, flowing effect of taxes, rising inflation, no free flow of goods across the country, fragmented markets across the country, were some of the vague issues afflicting the indirect taxation system in India. GST has persuaded people to do businesses in a transparent manner without evading taxes.

There has been an indirect tax collection of Rs. 89,885 crores averagely per month in the last 9 months. In the month of April Rs. 1.03 lakh crores, Rs. 94,016 crores in May, Rs. 95,610 crores in June show that GST has settled in well in the country. However, there is need for more cooperation from trade and industry to kill the culture of accepting bogus bills and make GST a true success.

The cooperative federalism GST is, it has jotted more economic purification of the country, ‘one nation, one tax, one market’ attribute, seamless movement of goods across the country by passing e-way bills, remarkable companionship between Centre, States, trade and industry, among others, to make this reform successful.

Apart from this the GST has also allowed the citizens a friendly approach with introducing reform for service taxpayers who are registered under GST system. In order to address the difficulties by the taxpayers of GST registered users on updating email and mobile number of the authorized signatory, the finance ministry has come up with detailed guidelines in order to address this issue.

Bringing out new changes, although some have been looking at this as a major drawback the others are happily celebrating and hailing the major achievement conquered by the government.