New Delhi: With no decision on rate hike of Goods and Services Tax (GST) in the GST Council’s 38th meeting held on 18 December, the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) has decided to take the campaign route to increase GST collection.
The CBIC is the nodal national agency responsible for administering customs, GST, central excise, service tax and narcotics in the country.
The CBIC’s decision to launch a campaign to increase GST collection has come amid growing pressure from the Ministry of Finance headed by Nirmala Sitharaman, for ramping up the annual GST revenue collection in the last four remaining months of the financial year 2019-20.
A senior CBIC official told The Sunday Guardian: “We have received a fresh communication from the Ministry of Finance which has directed the nodal agency to increase GST collection in the last four months of 2019-20; there should not be any excuse for the dip in tax collection.”
However, as per the sources, initially, the Finance Minister tried to reach an agreement on the GST rate hike in the GST Council meeting, but her proposal couldn’t win support from representatives from states and later she pushed for collection target. With the Union Finance minister as head and finance ministers of states as members, the GST Council is the apex decision making body for indirect taxes in the country.
“To meet the GST collection task, we have planned to launch an awareness campaign through which the department will urge individuals as well as entities to abide by the GST compliance norms. The department will also work to fix the loopholes and wrongly posed input credit demands by the firms,” the official cited above said.
“In November, the GST collection had increased to 6% to Rs 1.03 lakh crore, but the increase was attributed to festive shopping; repeating similar collection in December may not be possible as the purchase slump is visible across sectors and this is the reason of worry for the department. The department is trying to put extra efforts to meet the Finance minister’s expectations of tax collection,” the same official cited above explained.
Sources have confirmed that Revenue Secretary Ajay Bhushan Pandey will be monitoring the GST collection efforts and he will keep visiting different regions every weekend to supervise collection work.
Lower tax collection has been giving sleepless nights to officials of the Ministry of Finance. This has also led to the non-payment of compensation to five states, including West Bengal, Kerala, Delhi, Rajasthan, and Punjab.