Allied GST laws coming up

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is ready with draft laws to support the Goods and Services Tax legislation.  He will present them in Parliament in the second part of the Budget session. The GST Council, which is meeting on February 18, is expected to approve the draft Central and Integrated GST (IGST) laws in order to get them ready for introduction the House.

“My target is to finalise those drafts and take them in the second part of the Budget session of Parliament,” Jaitley said at a post-Budget interaction with India Inc. The Budget session will reconvene on March 9 after a month-long break. It will continue till April 12. Jaitley said that the final Central GST and Integrated GST drafts were being prepared now with legally “vetted language”.

These will be okayed by the GST Council and go to Parliament for passage. Simultaneously, the draft of State Goods and Service Tax (SGST) was also being readied to move to state legislatures for approval. He said the final rate structure of goods and services will then be finalised by May or June.

The GST Council in its earlier meeting had finalised a broad rate structure of four rate tiers of 5%, 12%, 18% and 28%. But what will fall in which bracket has not been decided yet. The finance minister said he did not tinker with indirect taxes and service tax much in the Budget because of an impending GST.

On political funding and the proposed electoral bonds, Jaitley said that in the past the government has tried to cleanse political funding by giving tax exemptions to both donors and political parties if payments were made by cheque but it did not help. Jaitley expressed hope that electoral bonds will help donors who wanted to give clean money to a political party.