The Empowered Committee of State Finance Ministers will further deliberate on the controversial one percentage point additional tax sought to be imposed under the GST framework to provide comfort to the producing States, its Chairman KM Mani has said.

“We will further discuss this.. There are views for (by producing States) the tax and against it,” Mani told BusinessLine on the sidelines of a national conference on GST organised by the CA Institute here.

Industry is also opposed to the planned 1 percentage point additional tax to be imposed by States on all inter-State sales, as per the current GST framework.

This tax is being seen as an effort of the policymakers to provide comfort to the producer States.

This issue will also come up during a presentation that Mani will make to the select panel of the Rajya Sabha on June 16.

Earlier, in his address at the national conference, Mani explained that GST is a means of achieving simple indirect tax structure which will transform India into a single common market.

A step forward

He said that having gone through the process of moving from disjointed Sales tax regime to much better form of taxation i.e. Value Added Tax, GST is the next step to make the indirect tax system much more smooth and non-cascading.

Mani elaborated that GST will enable voluntary tax compliance, facilitate simple and transparent tax administration, reduce scope for ethical hazard as well as tax load on the ultimate customer.

CA Institute President Manoj Fadnis later told BusinessLine that ICAI would provide suggestions to the Finance Ministry so to ensure that rules for GST are framed in a harmonious manner, without any inter-State differences.

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