Goods and services tax: the introduction process

Abstract

This paper focuses on the process of introducing the Goods and Services Tax (GST), bringing out the perspectives of different stakeholders and the contentious issues. The GST was expected to subsume a variety of taxes and simplify the indirect tax regime. The Empowered Committee (EC) was mandated in 2007, to bring about consensus among the States to move towards GST. The important stakeholders in the process were the Government of India (GoI), individual States, industry and the committees commissioned by the GoI or EC. However, the EC faced challenges since there were issues of control between the Centre and States, perceived loss of revenue by some States, extent of uniformity across various commodities and their tax rates, input credit mechanism and dispute settlement. The deadline for the introduction of GST kept getting postponed due to the slow resolution of the challenging issues. Finally, it was tabled in the Parliament as the 122nd Constitutional Amendment Bill (CAB) in December 2014.