Businesses facing ‘roadblock’
> ’Laws on price control and anti-profiteering too complex’
PETALING JAYA: Businesses are facing problems with the Price Control and Anti-Profiteering Act (PCAPA) and its regulations (PCAPR) to be enforced by the government during the implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST).
Deloitte Malaysia country tax leader Yee Wing Peng said yesterday although the government’s intention to ensure consumers are not unfairly taken advantage of when the GST is implemented, there is concern over the complexity of the laws relating to price control and antiprofiteering.
“We are concerned that the PCAPR are too complex for businesses to be able to deal with, particularly when they are trying to do the right thing,” he said at a seminar here yesterday on price control and anti-profiteering in the face of the GST implementation.
The laws make it an offence for businesses to capitalise on the GST roll-out to increase their net profit margins, and more amendments made at the end of 2014 had introduced new guidelines that set out a mechanism to determine “unreasonably high profits”.
“The GST’s input and output mechanism also allows the authorities to react to complaints about the pricing of any item and trace every level of the supply chain, to establish whether any business has marked up prices in a way that will give them unreasonably high profits,” Yee said.
Consumers can also play a small role in stopping unethical price hikes by reporting any business that refuses to comply with the anti-profiteering laws.
Meanwhile, Deloitte’s GST director Bruce Hamilton, expressed concern that overly stringent laws may present certain “roadblocks” for businesses looking to abide by the rules without violating them, adding that they may result in delay in business decision making,
“As such, businesses may need to adopt a more holistic view when working to comply with the antiprofiteering laws,” he said.
“Traders will have to be ready to produce the necessary documentation to support any changes in their pricing,” he added.