The GST council along with its rate fitment committee will be resolving the pending task of aligning of all the goods and services in different appropriate slabs to decide and include more and more products and service under the unified tax ambit. The meeting will be starting from 4 May in the national capital New Delhi for three days. A committee member from both central and state tax department spoke that alignment of the tax rate will be finalized at the end of the meeting.
The GST council will hold a two days meet in Srinagar starting from 18 May for the approval of the rates in direction of clearing the hurdles for July 1st GST roll out. The official said that “We shall do this exercise in such a way that there is little work left to be done or time required to be spent by the Council in giving its stamp of approval.”
The fitment committee is currently under process to fix the tax rate that would be matching to their present tax rate counterpart most effectively. It would also include the abatement currently offered in the account of the relief in which applying the tax rate on a partial value of the sales and the faults and errors in the present taxation scheme in the interstate supplies which effects the increasing outgoing tax. The proposed clause is to make the transition revenue neutral without affecting.
The services are speculated to be under two slab rates i.e. 12 and 18 percent of goods to be under different tax rates like 5, 12, 18, 28 and 28 percent plus cess. Revenue secretary Hasmukh Adhia said in a workshop earlier this week that, “There may be a special rate for gem and jewelry outside the other slabs, which could be anything between 2% and 5%. The GST Council will deliberate on this separately.”
The fitment committee will stress upon collecting more and more items under the GST which are presently under the central excise duty and state VAT exemptions. There are approx 99 items which are under the exemption from the VAT and 250 products are under central excise duty exemption.
