- Sunday, February 23, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
INDIAN finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday (1) praised tax officials for the enforcement measures dealing with Goods and Services Tax (GST) fraud and said the enhanced revenue collection in the recent months should be the “new normal”.
In a message to the officials on the fourth anniversary of the historic tax reform in the form of GST, she said the taxpayer base has almost doubled from Rs 66.25 lakh ($88,866) to Rs 1.28 crore ($171,696) in the last four years.
Sitharaman, who recently came up with a big stimulus package to revive the Indian economy hit by the coronavirus pandemic, said for the last eight successive months, GST revenues have crossed Rs 1 lakh crore ($13.4 billion) and in the month of April, a record GST revenue collection of Rs 1.41 lakh crore was made ($19 billion).
“Commendable work has been done in the year gone by both in the area of facilitation and enforcement with numerous cases of fraudulent dealers and ITC being registered. The enhanced revenue collection in recent months should now be the ‘new normal’,” Sitharaman said.
A nationwide GST, which subsumed 17 local levies like excise duty, service tax and value added tax (VAT) and 13 cesses, was rolled out at July 1, 2017, midnight.
Finance minister glad about overcoming challenges
Sitharaman expressed satisfaction about overcoming most of the GST implementation challenges, including two waves of the Covid-19 pandemic. She also thanked taxpayers for their support in making the tax reform a reality.
“Its positive externalities such as unified market, removal of cascading and improved competitiveness of goods and services has helped spur economic growth taking us further on the path to prosperity,” she said while lauding both central and state tax officers.
The Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) will issue certificate of appreciation to more than 54,000 GST payers for timely filing of returns and cash payment of GST in the last four years. Over 88 per cent of these taxpayers are from micro, small and medium enterprises.
She said any reform of this scale can be highly challenging in a large and diverse country like India.
“The GST Council has shown immense sagacity and wisdom in redressing legitimate concerns of taxpayers and citizens by course correction whenever needed. This has manifested itself not just in measures to ease the compliance burden on taxpayers, especially MSMEs, but also reducing the tax burden on the common man,” the finance minister said.
