NEW DELHI: The 13th Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council meeting on Friday approved the drafts of four sets of rules and finalised five others, even as the industry sought more time to understand the rules first before they get implemented.
The GST Council approved the draft rules relating to composition, valuation, ITC (input tax credit) and the transition process.
The next and 14th meeting of the GST Council has been fixed on May 18 and 19 in Srinagar. The GST Council will discuss and finalise the rules that have been approved and also the rate classification exercise.
“The five set of draft rules that were originally approved have been corrected in consonance with the GST legislations,” Finance Minister Arun Jaitley told reporters after the Council’s meeting.
He said the Council looked into the five other rules -- registration, payment, refund, invoices and returns. Since the drafts of these five were already approved in the previous meeting, they were finalised along with the amendments to be incorporated in GST Bills that the Lok Sabha had passed during the week.
“The four new rules have been tentatively approved and put up in public domain for suggestions. These will be finalised in the Council’s next meeting,” said the finance minister.
“The GST council will release the rates only around May 18. This may lead to delays in system implementation of rate changes. Once new rules and rates are finalised, a period of testing may be essential to the system.
MSMEs and SMEs will need more time to prepare themselves with regard to understanding input credit changes and pricing changes,” said Archit Gupta, founder and CEO, ClearTax.com.
The GST Council is looking at July 1 as the target date to implement GST. However, the industry is not confident that it will be ready for the change. GST aims to subsume plethora of local and central taxes into a single tax, from July 1, 2017.