Government soon to introduce negative list of service tax

06 Jul 2011 Evaluate

The Indian government is expected to come out with a draft ‘negative list’ for service tax in coming two weeks, meaning, services which are not revealed in it would be taxed in the proposed Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime. Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Finance, V K Garg said, 'The draft paper (on negative list of services) is nearly ready and you should see this paper in two weeks'.

Presently, only limited number of services fall in the tax net, government had proposed to tax most of the services under the GST regime. In the new system, all the services which are not mentioned in the negative list would be taxed in GST.  A constitution amendment Bill is pending in parliament which seeks to pave the way for introduction of GST.

Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee in the Budget 2011-12, had announced that a public debate on the service tax to help government to finalize the approach to GST would take place. The finance minister also said that many experts have argued that it will be desirable to tax services based on small negative list, so that many untapped sectors are bought into tax net. Such an approach will be conductive for a nationwide GST.

The government is planning to implement the GST from next financial year. Its implementation is viewed as important tax reform. However, it has been stuck for years because of disagreement between states and central government over the new structure of proposed GST. The proposed GST regime would include most of the indirect taxes, including Value Added Tax (VAT) on the state front, national and local service taxes, and services excise tax.

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