The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : VAT likely to be amended

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Apr 30, 2005

Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

VAT likely to be amended

Staff Reporter

HYDERABAD: The State Government has decided to consider changes to the policy, classification of commodities and slab rates for the purpose of implementation of Value Added Tax (VAT) with July 1 as the cut-off date.

The Group of Ministers appointed to oversee VAT implementation will meet any day after July 1 to consider the requests and views from the trade and industry on these changes. This was announced by the Commercial Taxes Commissioner, V. Bhaskar, at an interaction meeting organised by the Federation of Andhra Pradesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FAPCCI) here on Friday.

Mr. Bhaskar said that the Government felt it was a cumbersome procedure to amend the VAT law no matter how genuine the complaints were. It was therefore decided to wait for a full three months since the VAT came into force on April 1 to make "one-time" changes. This period should be sufficient to take note of all the bottlenecks.

Training programme

The Commissioner added that a series of programmes would be organised for the operations staff of Commercial Taxes here from May 2 to fine tune their skills and train them to pass on the benefits of Traders warned against jacking up pricestax reduction to the consumer.

The Government had also decided to make monthly refund of tax rebate to the plastic industry, particularly PVC pipes manufacturers and packaging industry, in order that its working capital was not blocked. The plastic industry was chosen for this benefit because its output tax was only 4 per cent and the input tax 12.5 per cent.

He maintained that the Government was examining complaints that traders were jacking up prices in the guise of VAT. "They cannot get away with it," he warned.

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