Service Tax Return – form changed again
The Government is at it again. The ST-3 form has been changed. Do you have printed copies of the form? Just sell them to the raddiwala and order fresh forms.
The ST3 prescribed along with the original Service Tax Rules lasted a good seven years when the first amendment was made by Notification No. 10/2001-Service Tax, dated 9-10-2001. But within ten months by Notification No. 12/2002-S.T., dated 1-8-2002, the Board changed the whole form. And this form lasted a good three years when the government again replaced it by Notification No. 31/2005-S.T., dated 20-10-2005. And in this year’s budget they made a small amendment to the form but now just after a month and may be after the comfort of collecting all their revenue, they have yesterday brought in a new form. The new form running into more than 10 pages will need a couple of experts to fill up.
But the important question is why the government is so callous in changing such forms so frequently? Is the CBEC determined to wipe out all the forests of the country? Why waste so much paper? Incidentally the return is to be filed in triplicate. Assuming that ten lakh assessees file two returns in a year, each filing sixty pages, that is 6 Crores pages! What do they do with so much destruction?
There is another tragic angle to this. In many cities you will find small, poor traders printing these forms and selling them to small units, for a small profit. Whenever the Government changes the proforma, all the printed materials lying in stock with these small traders become useless and they incur heavy losses, promoting them from poverty to starvation.
Even large units would get their stationery printed for a year or two and all that would go waste now. Perhaps there should be some law that whenever the Government changes the proforma, the forms have to be supplied for a year at Government cost. It is sheer adhoc callousness and lack of concern for the assessees that make our babus behave like this. Only those officers should be posted to the Board who have at least one close relative running a small industry and paying excise duty/Service Tax. Only then they will understand the agony they are able to cause in their great notification manufacturing and repairing exercise.
Notification. No. dated the 2nd April, 2007