ISSN : 2663-2187

Goods and Services Tax - A New Era in Indirect Taxation System of India

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Kali Charan, Dr. Richa Ranjan, Dr. Shwetta Bajaj, Dr. Monika Negi
» doi: 10.48047/AFJBS.6.Si3.2024.3218-3226

Abstract

Any Government Federal or Provincial need funds to run the State Machinery, for the implementation of welfare schemes and providing infrastructure like public building transports and roads etc. for the general public residing within the State. For the collections of these funds (State Exchequer) government impose taxes on the people those who can afford to pay. This Taxation System can broadly be categorized into two types i.e. Direct Taxation System and Indirect Taxation System. Direct Taxation system are the taxes which are collected from the person/persons who themselves are liable to pay the same and they furnish returns during a specified period and pay the due tax to the government as their own liability. Income Tax is a good example of Direct Taxation where a person (A person, A partnership firm, An Association or A Company having legal status termed as Legal Entity in Income Tax Laws) pays taxes to the State if he crosses a certain amount of income as prescribed by the State as threshold in a specified period. Whereas indirect taxation System is a system of taxation where government collect levy not from the taxpayer directly but from the person other than the taxpayer who is paying the said levy. e.g. in previous VAT regime or present GST regime the business entities collect tax from the end consumers and deposit it to the state exchequer and the state only interacts with the business entities who are manufacturing or selling the goods. A manufacturer or Trader gets registration with the government and files monthly/quarterly/annual return and he is solely liable to pay the taxes on the manufacturing or sale of goods. Consumer who is utilizing the end product pays the tax but the Manufacturer / seller pay the tax so collected from consumer to the government that’s why its called indirect taxation system. The Government in recent times has gone through many indirect tax regimes trying to make this cumbersome system a little easy to understand to the tax payer so that they can abide the law in letter and spirit and the pilferage of tax can be reduced up to some extent. Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 was remarkable step of the Government of India which made this system of Indirect system little user friendly, making it easy to understand and adopt it to the common public. In this article, the author is going to study the problems in the previous indirect taxation (VAT) systems and also throwing some light to the objectives attained by the Government in the present regime (GST) in the last seven years of the implementation of the GST Act, 2017.

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