The GST Council, headed by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, on Friday approved the remaining set of rules for the Goods and Services Tax regime. This was the first meeting of the Council after Parliament cleared four GST legislations earlier this week.
“The agenda for today’s meeting was four new set of rules — input tax credit, valuation, composition levy and transitional rules. Today, officials had a meeting and some changes were suggested to these rules. Those rules along with the changes have been tentatively approved by the GST council,” the minister said after the 13th meeting of the council.
He added that the final corrected draft will now be put up for stakeholder/industry comments. Changes if required, based on comments, would be incorporated and “... in the next meeting will be taken up... and affirmed and become [the] final approval itself.”
The next meeting of the Council will be held on May 18-19 in Srinagar where besides the rules being given a final approval, the rate structure in relation to individual commodities will be taken up for consideration. If these rates are approved at that meeting, industry would get a little over a month to gear up for proposed roll out date of July 1 for the GST regime.
“In the meanwhile, the officers committee will start working on fitment of those rates itself,” the Finance Minister said.
The GST Council has also approved some “technical changes” to the five rules for return, registration, payment, invoice and refund approved earlier.
“The five rules were prepared prior to the formulation of the principal acts. These rules had to be partly amended and altered to bring them to conformity with provisions of the act because rules must always be in consonance with the act,” Mr.Jaitley said.
He added that the amended drafts were circulated today and a final approval was granted on the amendments made.
“As the position stands, out of the nine set of rules... the original five, which we had approved, have been corrected… and brought in consonance of the act. Those now now become final. And the four new rules will be put in the public domain and in the next meeting will be taken up... for consideration. The original five rules were already put up in public domain so there is no need to do that again,” he said.
