Swamy to voice concerns over pvt banks having access to sensitive data

Despite Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s unwillingness to discuss the recommendation by Standing Committee for Finance which states that GST norms should be implemented only through public sector banks, Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy and one of the members of the committee are going to take up the issue on Thursday during the GST council meeting. It also recommends creation of an IT infrastructure to uphold privacy on sensitive data.

The recommendation states, “The Committee feels GSTN (GST Network) shall play a crucial role in implementation of GST as it shall provide the IT infrastructure for implementation of GST. It noted that non Government shareholding of GSTN is dominated by private banks. This is not desirable because of two reasons. Firstly, public sector banks have more than 70% share in total credit lending in the country. Secondly, GSTN’S work is of strategic importance to the country and the firm would be a repository of a lot of sensitive data on business entities across the country.” Adding further, the recommendation also says, “In light of above, the Committee strongly recommends that Government may take immediate steps to ensure non Government financial institution shareholding be limited to public sector banks or public sector financial institutions.”

Swamy seems to be rigid to his point this time and official sources said that he is teaming up with small political parties’ parliamentarians to pass his recommendation unanimously.

The GST Council is likely to endorse supplementary legislations needed for implementation of the GST regime in the meeting. The Council, comprising representatives of all states, may also take up capping segregation that to be levied on demerit goods like luxury cars and tobacco products for creation of a corpus that will be used for compensating states for any loss of revenue from GST implementation in the first five years.