The all-powerful Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council is all set to meet once again on December 22 and December 23, to discuss model GST laws and sort out contentious issue of dual control of assesses in the new indirect tax regime. This will be the seventh meeting of the Council and Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will chair the meeting and has state ministers as members.
In the last meeting, the Council has cleared as many as 20 chapters of the model GST law and remaining 7 chapters will discuss in the first day of meeting and will take up the dual control issue in the next day. As consensus avoided the Council meeting, the subsequent GST legislations -- CGST, IGST and compensation law could not be introduced in the winter session of Parliament that ended last week. This has threatened the April 2017 target for rollout of the GST.
Earlier, the GST Council agreed on a four-slab structure - 5, 12, 18 and 28 per cent along with a cess on luxury and ‘sin’ goods such as tobacco. GST is a singular tax reform that will remove barriers across states and integrate the country into a common market.
