Migration to GST - How many Service Tax Assessees in India?
THE Government, at the best of times, is not really comfortable with numbers and this is more so with the Revenue Departments. The latest controversy in GST is the number of assessees in Service Tax that can be migrated to GST. It seems in the first meeting of the GST Council, the States were told that there are 11 lakh service tax assessees in the country, but for today's meeting of the GST Council, the States were informed that there are 30.5 lakh assessees. How did the number of assessees go up by nearly three times in two months? Will the decision supposed to have been taken earlier that the Service Tax assessees will be with the Centre under the GST regime go for a toss with the revelation that there 31 lakh assessees and not merely 11 lakh? This is sure to figure in the GST Council meeting today. Will the Central Revenue authorities be able to come up with a more mature and accurate figure by day after tomorrow? And the ACES website states that there are 15.1 lakh service tax assessees. They should know better, for they are the ones who collect the returns. God knows when this figure was last updated.
Incidentally, in his Budget Speech on 28 February, 2013, the then Finance Minister P.Chidambaram said -
183. While there are nearly 17,00,000 registered assessees under service tax, only about 7,00,000 file returns. Many have simply stopped filing returns. We cannot go after each of them. I have to motivate them to file returns and pay the tax dues. Hence, I propose to introduce a one-time scheme called 'Voluntary Compliance Encouragement Scheme'.
If we are not sure about the number of assessees we have in this digitally controlled world, how are we going to compute the tax collected and compensation due for each state?
And why is the GST Council so secretive? They don't seem to have a website and because of their silence a lot of information - often false, is getting circulated and if newspapers are to be believed, the Council leaks like a sieve and is full of anonymous officers ready to leak information to the Press under the cover of anonymity. And the Revenue Secretary has stopped tweeting, while his boss, the Finance Minister took to the blog recently to explain certain facets of GST. Cooperative federalism is a good phrase; so is, transparency in administration.