Team Blitz India
NEW DELHI: The journey of one nation, one tax, one market is bearing fruits and we need to keep up the pace. The nation’s tax revenues are consistently clocking more than Rs 1.6 lakh crore while there are many areas still to be tapped. Special Secretary and Member (GST), Central Board of Indirect Taxes (CBIT), Shashank Priya informed this at a conference here recently.
“We are looking at easing compliance, but at the same time, we are trying to see how we can bring in regularity of compliances and timely return filing and tax payment,” he added. We need to work towards addressing problems that keep coming at the field level, he said. The CBIT official was addressing the conference on GST organised by Assocham.
The board has taken a major decision to become a model two state, which means “now we will not have our own back end system. We will be migrating to the back end system of GSTN because at the field level, there were problems regarding loss of data. We also felt that there will be a synergy between what the states and the Centre does if we are all working on one back-end system”, he informed the delegates.
Pratik Jain, Chairman, National Council on Indirect Taxes, Assocham, in his welcome address said that GST collections had been good over the past few months, and the collection target for FY24 was likely to be exceeded. “There is no doubt that GST has brought in structural simplicity with one law and uniform tax rates across states,” said Jain.
However, industry feels that the Government needs to push the ‘ease of doing business’ agenda hard now. More than legislative aspects, tax administration needs to be streamlined. There is a need for stakeholders to come together and adopt a consultative approach as we move ahead, he added.
Ritesh Kanodia, Co-Chairman, Assocham, National Council on Indirect taxes said that some important issues that needed immediate consideration were, multiplicity of audits. He stressed that while resolution may not be immediate, the direction was to achieve ease of doing business by better use of technology.
