Ease of Compliance to Boost GST Revenues

In the fourth year of the GST regime, the government is determined to focus on the simplification of tax administration and ease of compliance for taxpayers. Facilitating ease of compliance would result in significant growth in revenue collections, with better and satisfying experience for the GST taxpayers. Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who is also the chairperson of the GST Council, on July 1 said, “The government is committed to continue on these [simplification and compliance-related] reforms in future as well to facilitate taxpayers.” She said that the government “strived to make return filing process easy and simple for small taxpayers by introducing features like SMS-based filing for nil return. However, more efforts are required to ease tax compliance further for the taxpayers, especially MSMEs.” She underlined that the priority of the government would be to proactively address the compliance challenges faced by businesses and GST taxpayers and “only by this proactivity we can ensure much needed economic growth in the near future.” The finance minister thus set the immediate agenda for GST, now in its fourth year. The revenue secretary further underlined that the government is trying its best to hasten technological interventions to ensure that the problems encountered in the system are minimised. Last month, finance minister launched issuance of PAN card through Aadhaar. A similar reform is planned for GST as well.