 "FM-chaired GST Council meets today, tomorrow")
The aim will be to address the contentious issue of administrative turf between Centre and states. Tax experts say this will be difficult.
The Centre might push a cross-empowerment model of random choosing and division of five% of the assessees between Centre and the states, using a computer programme. The parameters on which the assessees could be chosen would be in-built in software written for this purpose.
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However, states want sole control over assessees up to Rs 1.5 crore of annual turnover.
Naveen Wadhwa of Taxmann thinks a solution could be found outside the suggested models. He says states could have sole control over assessees up to Rs 1.5 crore of turnover if their supplies are intra-state; above that, the Centre should. If supplies are inter-state, the Centre should have control over all assessees, he said.
In any case, he feels, the April 1, 2017, target date is now difficult to meet.
Almost half of the 99 sections of the model GST Bill have already been approved by the Council and the rest would be taken up in the two-day meeting. “If the issue of administrative control is sorted, the Bill could be tabled in the Budget session of Parliament,” says R Muralidharan, senior director with consultancy Deloitte.
However, even then the issue of rolling out a GST from April would be a challenging one, he added. If the issue is not resolved in the meeting, the Council can try once more in January, he said.
The issue of administrative control would be taken by the Council “if time permits”, finance minister Arun Jaitley had said earlier. The two-day meeting earlier this month did not take up the issue.
Last week, Jaitley had described the prickly issue as minor in the larger frame of things. He had suggested each assessee be assessed only once, since central taxes like excise and service tax and state levies like VAT are being subsumed into one.
“You have the pre-existing (tax) machinery of the Centre and states. (It has to be decided) how the burden of this assessment is going to be shared between the Centre and states, and how we cross-empower both the Centre and states,” he had said.