The Goods and Services Tax (GST) is a comprehensive destination based tax levy on manufacture, sale and consumption of goods and services at a national level which subsumed other indirect taxes such as Octroi, Central Sales Tax, State-level Sales Tax, Entry Tax, telecom licence fees, turnover tax, tax on consumption or sale of electricity, taxes on transportation of goods and services, etc. thus avoiding multiple layers of taxation that existed in India. It has created a single, unified Indian market to make the economy stronger. The essence of GST is that the cascading effects of both CENVAT and service tax is expected to be removed with set-off, and a continuous chain of set-off from the original producer’s point and service provider’s point upto the retailer’s level will be established.

GST brought in transparent and corruption-free tax administration, removing the current shortcomings in indirect tax structure. GST is business friendly as well as consumer friendly. GST in India is poised to drastically improve the positions of each of these stakeholders. We need a change in the taxation system which is better than earlier taxation. This need for change leads us to ‘need for GST’.

Benefits:

• Reduction in multiplicity of taxes
• Mitigation of cascading/ double taxation
• Development of common national market
• Simpler tax regime

Who should get registered under GST:

Every business carrying out a taxable supply of goods or services and whose turnover exceeds the threshold limit of Rs. 20 lakhs (Rs 10 lakhs for North Eastern and hill states) is required to register as a normal taxable person.

Businesses that need to register under GST irrespective of their turnover:

• Every person who is registered under the Pre-GST law (i.e., Excise, VAT, Service Tax etc.) Needs to register under GST.
• When a business which is registered has been transferred to someone, the transferee shall take registration with effect from the date of transfer.
• Anyone who drives inter-state supply of goods.
• Casual taxable person.
• Non-Resident taxable person.
• Agents of a supplier.
• Those paying tax under the reverse charge mechanism.
• Input service distributor.
• E-commerce operator or aggregator.
• Person who supplies via e-commerce aggregator.
• Person supplying online information and database access or
• retrieval services from a place outside India to a person in India, other than a registered taxable person