GST will be vigorously pursued - President
IN her address to the Joint Session of Parliament yesterday, the President, Pratibha Devisingh Patil said,
1. My Government has been able to significantly increase realization of direct taxes as a result of improved and simplified tax administration and this process will continue.
2. The roadmap for moving towards a Goods and Services Tax will be vigorously pursued.
3. My Government is fully seized of the issue of illegal money of Indian citizens outside the country in secret bank accounts. It will vigorously pursue all necessary steps in coordination with the countries concerned.(apparently the President's speech writers have better command over English than the Babus of North Block – If this was drafted by the Finance minions, it would have read as “concerned countries”)
What the President's speech writers did not realise on those three points are:
1. The TPL in CBDT has already complicated matters so much that you need a super computer and an army to credit the TDS to the Government. Because of this the TDS collections will fall drastically. Every effort to simplify the tax administration ends up in causing tragic misery to the tax payer. Just imagine how much time has to be spent in generating a Unique Transaction Number for every TDS deduction!
2. GST: The Government hardly has ten months to meet the GST implementation target and as of now they don't have the law, the infrastructure or even the direction. For a successful GST you need a good IT infrastructure and even in Central Excise the computerisation project is not taking off. The ACES is still somewhere in the wiring stage. The other day I went to a Central Excise Chief Commissioner's office and found the whole place weird. They were trying to do the wiring for the ACES project! The State Commercial taxes Departments are not even on talking terms. A sleek manager like P. Chidambaram could perhaps have pushed it through – but apparently, some strong forces don't want him in the Finance Ministry. God Save The Country.
3. Money in Foreign Banks: This is what the BJP wanted to do. As long as politicians have their money stashed away in foreign banks, it is assured that nobody is going to bring them back. Maybe we should start a National Black Money Bank where any amount of money can be deposited without any questions being asked. We can charge a nominal deposit fee and request all the patriotic black money holders to deposit in this Bank instead of foreign Banks.