Need more efforts to ease tax compliance: FM
NEW DELHI: Taxation, especially the goods and services tax (GST), needs to be further simplified to make life easier for tax payers, a critical requirement for a self-reliant nation, Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Wednesday.
More efforts were needed to further ease tax compliance, especially for small businesses, Sitharaman said on the third anniversary of the rollout of GST. “The government is committed to continue reforms in future as well to facilitate tax payers,” the minister said.
Sitharaman’s promise about simplifying the tax administration comes a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi thanked tax payers and farmers for helping the government to offer humanitarian support during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Tax administration, especially GST administration, will have a large role to play, in view of Modi’s call to make the country self-reliant, the finance minister said.
“We must foresee the issues faced by our business community and proactively address the same to enable them to compete on a global scale,” she said. Only such proactivity can ensure the muchneeded economic growth in future.
On July 1, 2017, GST replaced a complex web of central and state taxes with a value added tax system and unified the market by removing barriers at state borders. However, the technologydriven tax system that sought to make economic activity more accountable faced several glitches and a backlash from small traders.
The transparency in the tax system highlighted certain anomalies in tax rates.