New Delhi: With the new GST regime firmly entrenched, a complete overhaul of the

tax rates is now required to reduce the burden on small and medium businesses,
Revenue secretary Hasmukh Adhia has said.

In an interview to PTI, he said the Goods and Services Tax (GST), which amalgamates
more than a dozen central and state levies like excise duty, service tax and VAT,
will take about a year to stabilise. Nearly four months since its introduction, the
new indirect tax threw up teething troubles and compliance issues, which the GST
Councilthe highest decision-making body of the new regimehas addressed through
several rounds of changes.

To ease hassles facing medium and small businesses in paying taxes and filing GST
returns, it has tweaked various aspects of the new indirect tax regime to make it
industry friendly. Also the GST Council has rationalised rates on over 100
commodities and made refund process easier for exporters. There is a complete
overhauling that is required. It is possible that some items in the same chapter
are divided.

So ideally we should do harmonisation of items chapter wise and wherever we find

there is a big burden on small and medium businesses and on common man, we have to
bring them down (and) then only there will be a better compliance, a better
acceptability of GST, Adhia said. He, however, said the overhauling would require
some calculations by the fitment committee, which will decide which items need a
rationalisation of rate under the GST regime which kicked in from 1 July.

The GST Council has already cleared an approach paper for items to be considered
for rationalisation but it is not binding and the council can always make deviation
from the approach paper. So the committee will work on it for a month and then we
will try and bring something as early as in Guwahati or later on, Adhia said. The
23rd meeting of the GST Council, chaired by Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and
comprising of representatives of all states, will be held in Guwahati on 10
November.

We are very keen to do it as early as possible, it depends on how much time the
fitment committee takes to work on it. They need data, calculate revenue loss. They
need various comparisons. But harmonisation has to be done. A complete review has
to be done, he said. The GST Council has reworked various provisions of the new
indirect tax regime which was introduced from 1 July so as to make it more industry
friendly.

The turnover threshold for composition scheme, under which businesses can pay taxes
at a nominal rate, has been hiked to Rs1 crore, from Rs75 lakh earlier. Also small
businesses up to Rs1.50 crore turnover has been allowed to file returns and pay
taxes quarterly, as against monthly earlier. When asked how much time will it take
to stabilise the GST system, Adhia said: It will take one year.

Because it is a new system for everybody... There has been a complete overhauling
of tax system in GST so one year is needed. If you see the experience of VAT,
there was opposition for one year. People were on streets because nobody knew what
VAT is, the last fellow was only paying sales tax.

It was more opposition that time than this, he said. Introduced in 2005, VAT
replaced the earlier Sales Tax systems. VAT was a tax on sale or purchase of goods
within a state and was levied by state governments. The GST has subsumed over a
dozen taxes and transformed India into a single market for seamless movement of
goods and services.