[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
In its meeting scheduled on 4 August 2018, the Goods and Services Tax Council (GST Council) is likely to have a look at granting monetary relief to Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) that register a turnover of ₹ 1.5 crore, according to some sources.
This would be the 29 th council meeting that is scheduled to exclusively focus on the challenges facing small tax payers, such as laws, tax rates, procedure and GST Network related issues.
The sources added that the GST Council is formulating a final proposal on the tax sops, but would refund a certain percentage of tax — that the small tax payers had paid — back to them. This would ensure that the GST would not have exemptions or differential rates, and also the input credit tax (ITC) chain also remains unaffected.
The GST Council decided to grant this relief to the MSMEs because this sector was exempt from various taxes and duties before the implementation of GST. For example, small scale industries with a turnover of less than ₹ 1.5 crore enjoyed excise duty exemption since 2008.
Although such relief packages to MSMEs would mean a cut in GST revenues, GST council sources said that even a sop of small magnitude would have a large part of tax payers under its ambit, because these tax payers contribute a small fraction to the GST revenue collection.
Demonetisation had affected MSMEs the most. Moreover, the small industries found it hard to adapt to IT-heavy infrastructure of the new tax regime. This led to difficulties for tax payers in complying with the new tax regime without working with a tax professional. This had led to additional costs to the business.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
