The Haryana Assembly on Thursday passed the Goods and Services Tax Bill, 2017, in the special one-day session of the House. It also gave legislators a hike in salaries and allowances with monthly salary of Ministers set to jump from Rs. 50,000 to Rs. 60,000 per month.

Haryana Excise and Taxation Minister Abhimanyu said the GST is a path-breaking reform in taxation history which will knit the entire country into a single market by ironing out distortions, putting an end to skewed and dissimilar tax practices and make the going for trade and industry a lot easier.

Capt Abhimanyu said the new tax would subsume 17 different types of indirect taxes of the Centre and States and do away with the multiplicity of taxes.

“The GST will take the feature of the Value Added Tax (VAT) from State boundaries to the national level. The GST is a destination-based tax. The threshold limit under the GST has been fixed at Rs. 20 lakh, which is currently Rs. 5 lakh in Haryana,” he said.

Capt. Abhimanyu said another important feature of the GST was that tax practices had been harmonised to the best possible extent.

“Traders under composition scheme would be required to pay tax at the rate of half per cent under the State GST and half per cent under the CGST. The manufactures will have to pay at the rate of 1% and taxpayers serving foods will be paying at the rate of 2.5% under the composition scheme of GST,” he said.

He said a taxpayer will have to deal with only one taxing authority. “The principle of single interface for the taxpayers constitutes the cornerstone of GST implementation.

Therefore, the State authorities and central authorities have been cross-empowered to perform various statutory functions under the Central and States laws to provide single interface to the taxpayers,” the minister added.

  Source – http://www.thehindu.com [05-05-2017]