While the Finance Ministry is working on the final draft of the Amendment Bill for the proposed Goods and Services Tax (GST) and Finance Minister, Pranab Mukherjee is willing ‘to go an extra mile to get a consensus on GST from the opposition on the same,’ the proposed tax regime is still likely to miss its implementation deadline and may not come into force along with the Direct Taxes Code (DTC) in April 2012 as planned.
The GST has already missed out its implementation deadline twice, first it was to be implemented in April 2010, the date was later revised to April 2011 and now it’s likely to miss its third deadline too.
Revenue Secretary, Sunil Mitra stated that “the government will have liked to bring both DTC and GST together… But the legislation cannot be voted upon until the ratification is completed… There may be problem on the time factor (April 1, 2012)”, he however added that ‘the government had the flexibility to introduce it any time during a financial year unlike direct tax legislation.’
