Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will chair her first meeting of the GST Council on June 21, 2019. Sitharaman, who took over the reigns of Finance Ministry from Arun Jaitley last month, will preside over the 35th meeting of the GST Council, which is a federal decision making body comprising of state finance ministers.
35th GST Council agenda-
- GST Council will consider slashing GST rate on electric vehicles from 12 per cent currently to 5 per cent.
- Consider extending the tenure of the National Anti-Profiteering Authority (NAA) by a year till November 30, 2020, as the authority continues to receive consumer complaints of profiteering against companies.
- Anti-evasion steps such as integration of e-way bill with NHAI’s FASTag from April 1, 2020. Such an integration would help find the location of the vehicle and when and how many times it has crossed NHAI’s toll plazas and restrict transporters from doing multiple trips by generating a single e-way bill.
- Asking businesses with a turnover of over Rs 50 crore to issue e-invoice for B2B (business-to-business) sales. As these businesses account for just 1.02 per cent of GST payers, but they make up almost 30 per cent of the B2B invoices generated in the system.
- Asking states to make e-ticketing mandatory for all movie halls.
14 Blocked Input Tax Credit (ITC) under GST
- Consider tweaking GST rate on lotteries – currently, a state-organised lottery attracts 12 per cent GST, while a state-authorised lottery attracts 28 per cent tax.
- Discuss a mechanism for single-point sanctioning and processing GST refunds. The current mechanism entails twin refund sanctioning authority of the central and state tax officers, but that could well change by August when the proposed new structure involving a single authority comes in place. As per the single point system being worked out by the Revenue Department, the taxpayer will get full refund from jurisdictional officer once the claim is sanctioned, while at the back-end the Centre and states will apportion the amount to be paid to each other.
- Deliberate on setting up a national bench of the Appellate Authority for Advance Ruling to reconcile the contradictory orders on similar issues passed by the Authority for Advance Ruling in different states, a move aimed at providing certainty to taxpayers.
GST Council may take decisions to remove more items from the 28% slab
- Consider another anti-evasion proposal of issuance of e-invoices on a centralised government portal by businesses with turnover of Rs 50 crore and above for B2B sales.
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10. The Council is also likely to approve a draft amendment bill to bring changes in GST law to allow businesses to rectify mistakes during payment of GST and applicability of interest only on cash component in case of delayed payment of GST.
11. It may take decision on extending Annual return GSTR-9 due date for FY 2017-18.
