Vishal Parekh, regional head, South Asia, Thomson Reuters said in an interview that, in terms of GST, Corporates noticed that there are more vast changes in tax infrastructure than the changes made in basic compliance.
“In the last several months, we have had discussions with CFOs and tax heads, and post one year of GST, there is a very different mood around tax and finance,” Mr. Parekh said.
“The entire focus was in just trying to get an infrastructure in place so that there was compliance in GST.”
To get through the compliance process in the technology department, most of the IT companies had used their existing bandwidth or to get their returns, they have substitute people.
“Now that the one year has passed, there is a growing realization that without having a systematic way to deal with this in terms of processes, workflows, and technology, this is not sustainable,” Mr. Parekh added.
“That’s where we have seen a growing awareness, that where they are today is good for the first year of GST, but that they really need to start thinking about a transformation in the way they look at tax.”
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He explained that this change means distinct things to distinct companies. For example, just to improve the GST module of Mid-to-large segment companies, they will be upgrading their present tax and finance infrastructure.
“Some others, which are fairly global in scale, are looking at their entire workflow and seek to upgrade their entire tax workflow, be it direct tax, transfer pricing, indirect tax, compliance, and they want to automate all of that in one go, even if it takes two years to do so,”.
Mr. Parekh also stated that India does not have that much hard GST return filing process in front of other countries which are much more compliant and running under strict policies.
“The US and Brazil when it comes to indirect tax and sales tax are probably some of the most complex jurisdictions I have seen,” he said. “Tax in today’s world is complex everywhere. In India, with GST coming in, I think a lot of people would argue that it has become easier as they don’t have to deal with excise duty, checkpoints, octroi tax.”
