Proactively address issues faced by biz: FM ask officers

NEW DELHI: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday asked GST officers to foresee the issues faced by domestic businesses and address them proactively so that they can compete on a global scale and build a selfreliant India.

In a message to tax officers on the third anniversary of Goods and Services Tax (GST), Sitharaman also said there is scope for easing compliance further for taxpayers, especially MSMES.

Asking taxmen to focus on the clarion call by Prime Minister Narendra Modi for an ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’, she said for this motto of self reliance tax, especially GST, administration will have a large role to play.

We must foresee the issues faced by our business community and proactively address the same to enable them to compete on a global scale. Only by this proactivity can we ensure much needed economic growth in near future, she said in the message on the occasion of GST Day, 2020.

GST, which subsumed over a dozen local taxes, was introduced on July 1, 2017. Since then the GST process has been simplified and return filing made easy especially for small businesses. The GST administration has also introduced Smsbased return filing system for ‘NIL’ filers.

The government had allowed a relaxed time schedule for filing of GST returns and returns for the month of April, March as well as February got filed during June 2020. Some returns of May 2020, which would have otherwise got filed in June 2020, will get filed during first few days of July 2020, the Ministry added.