KV Network

Moving beyond restructuring

Moving beyond restructuring
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The State’s commercial taxes department has been groping in the dark following the announcement to implement the Goods and Services Tax regime. Not only has confusion hit the overall functioning of the department but the trading community too has been put to a lot of trouble.

No wonder then that the government had to come out with something unique to come over the crisis. The state government presently headed by the Governor Satya Pal Malik on Wednesday took a step towards re-organization of the entire commercial taxes department as it approved the re-organization of the Commercial Taxes Department with a view to bringing its functioning in tune with the requirements of the GST legislation and to improve its efficiency in tax administration.

The SAC approved renaming of “Commercial Taxes Department” as “State Taxes Department”, re-designation of the existing posts, re-designation of 10 posts of Assistant Commissioners, Commercial Taxes as Assistant Commissioner, State Taxes (Enforcement) with their defined areas of jurisdiction.

After the introduction of GST in the State, a need has arisen to reorganize and restructure the existing Commercial taxes Department in keeping with the requirements of the GST legislation as has been done by the other states and the Central Excise Department.

The existing field formations in the department are required to handle all key functions in a particular geographic region under VAT regime and therefore require an immediate restructuring.

There are various issues which need to be taken up immediately. The GST implementation came at a time when the entire trade fraternity was not willing to shift over to the new tax regime. Therefore, GST preparedness among clients was missing when it actually became a law and all transactions had to be carried out under this new regime.

The clients has no idea of how to service new bills and who actually pays for the GST amount that is to be deposited in favor of the exchequer. There was lot of ambiguity regarding the implementation of GST and as a result GST deductions took place at multiple levels causing a great distress to the consumer in the end.

The GST regime also failed to educate the trading community besides, the general masses and the lack of clarity on GST Provisions (Rules and Regulation) added to the commotion.

GST overall means an increased compliance. The regime brought an increase in the number of returns to be filed annually. The end user has to file GST returns at frequent intervals which also led to an overall dislike for the new regime.

Another issue that has cropped up is the unpreparedness of IT systems. Not only are the government departments unable to cope up with the requirements of the new tax regime but the overall sector associated with the taxation system needed a much better framework of IT base so as to enable them to perform in a much better way.

GST regime has meant that skilled resources are needed to cope up with the new regime. No effort was initiated for generating that skilled force or need to re-skilling of those who were associated with the tax regimes and its offshoots.


KV Network

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