The latest nationwide crisis of demonetization-instigated money emergency has given a toll of reasons to the industries of various genre for getting themselves under the hood for a little while and still the industry needs more opportunity to set itself up for the goods and services tax (GST) and so is not stressed over a delay in its roll-out.
Pithampur industry association president Gautam Kothari said that “Let the industry recover from demonetization and the resultant economic slowdown. A new tax regime will bring its own set of challenges. We are expecting GST implementation from the second quarter of 2017.” While Association of Industry, Madhya Pradesh, president OP Dhoot mentioned that, “We feel that GST should not be implemented until there is total clarity on the new law. There are some issues that would become clear once the GST Council deliberations are over. For now, we have been asked to complete the provisional registration for GST.”
The GST Council, led by finance minister Arun Jaitley, is yet to concur on three more issues, and its rollout looks impossible by April 1, 2017. Once the law is passed, the industry will require no less than three months ideal opportunity to be GST prepared as the IT foundation should be set up. Dewas industry association president Ashok Khandelia depicted that, “The problem in implementing GST midway through the financial year is that two separate books will have to be maintained for that year — one related to VAT and other taxes, and the other when GST gets implemented. The question also arises on how to claim input credit and other such claims. So we would prefer that it gets implemented from the new financial year, although that is highly unlikely now.”
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Jaitley said a week ago that specific “turf issues” still stay to be dealt with before the GST roll-out and the new indirect tax administration can be actualized whenever between April 1 and September 16, 2017. Meanwhile, Arun Jaitley concluded that “GST is a transactional tax and not an income tax. Transactional tax can start in any part of the financial year and therefore, the range of timing when it has to come into force because of constitutional necessity is April 1, 2017, to September 16, 2017.”
