Stressing that India had been able to implement the major indirect tax reform GST in the least disruptive manner, Union Minister Arun Jaitley on Sunday said “the best of the new regime in terms of contribution to the society is yet to come.”
The government rolled out the Goods and Services Tax (GST), which encompasses 17 indirect taxes and a host of cesses, on the intervening midnight of June 30 and July 1 last year.
Observing that countries implementing GST had witnessed major disruption, Mr. Jaitley said he too had felt that it would cause disruption in the Indian economy.
“I myself used to use the word disruptive when it came to major reform like GST because it takes time to settle down. But after one year of experience, I’m not too sure whether I can use the word disruptive for GST reform,” said Mr. Jaitley while addressing an event to mark the completion of one year under the new tax reform.
The GST, he said, would have a long-term impact on the country’s GDP growth, ease of doing business, expansion of trade and industry, the Make in India initiative, besides promoting honest business practices.
“As the tax collection goes up, the capacity to rationalise the slabs, the capacity to rationalise the rates, also will certainly increase. And, therefore, that capacity to rationalise will increase once the total volume of tax collected significantly increases,” Mr. Jaitley said.
Stating that the input tax credit was an effective way to ensure that people made their disclosures faster, Mr. Jaitley said, “Once you have a more efficient tax system it will ensure that evasion does not take place.
“The e-way bill has already been implemented and once the invoice-matching comes in, evasion and detection of evasion itself will become far simpler itself,” he said.
