GST Council meet: Tax cut on Sanitary napkins, return simplification on cards

The Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council comprising officials of federal and 29 states meeting is underway. This is the 28th time the GST Council is meeting with the agenda of lowering of tax rates on certain items including sanitary napkins, stationery items, and simplification of some tax rules. The finance minister is likely to brief media after the meeting.

Experts believe that the tax rates on as many as 32 items could be lowered. 

It is also to be noted that the interim Finance Minister Piyush Goyal will chairing his first meeting as Arun Jaitley is recovering from the surgery performed in May.

The format for annual returns and audit is likely to be approved by the GST Council in its meeting today and the industry expects that there could be some reconciliation with annual IT returns as the government aims to check tax evasion.

Goods and Services Tax (GST) was rolled out on July 1, 2017, and this is the first year when businesses will have to file annual returns (GSTR-9) for 2017-18 fiscal by December 31, 2018. Also those businesses with turnover of more than Rs 2 crore will have to file audit reports along with the annual returns.

The decision on sugar cess, which remained undecided and was sent to a committee for the report, could also be taken up. 

Tax experts said they expect the annual returns form to be in line with that in the erstwhile Value Added Tax (VAT) regime, with some columns for reconciliation with Income Tax returns and audit report. They expect the forms to be made available online by October, so that the returns could be filed within the December due date.

Deloitte India Partner M S Mani said: "Considering the fact that the key objective of GST is to expand the tax base, it is expected that the GST annual return would require some information related to annual accounts and income tax returns, in addition to the details which were required to be submitted in the erstwhile VAT annual returns".

They expect that in the VAT era, assessments were made on the basis of annual returns and the same process should be followed in the GST regime as well.

Experts said the businesses might commit some error in the monthly returns filed and those could get corrected in the annual returns and hence assessment should be on the basis of annual returns.

EY India Tax Partner Abhishek Jain said: "Given the first year of GST, the industry would expect the Annual Return format to be simple and if possible only require PAN based data reconciliation with the financials and not state wise or GSTIN wise data reconciliation with financials. The said demand essentially being on account of most company IT systems not being configured to extract state wise financials".