SME Times News Bureau | 12 Jan, 2019
Industry
body CII has welcomed the GST Councilâs recent decision which will boost the
micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME) sector.
CII
appreciates and welcomes the said decision made by the GST Council, as this
would help ease the tax compliances especially for those small businesses, who
were not availing the input tax credit earlier and also, including a wider set
of MSMEs take the benefits of the schemes that help ease the burden of compliances
leading to overall ease of doing business, said CII in a press statement.
The GST
Council in its 32nd meeting on 10 January 2019, announced many decisions
to boost the growth of Small Businesses.
The
Council approved for higher exemption threshold limit for goods
suppliers, approving doubling of the exemption (from
Registration and payment of GST) threshold under Goods and Services Tax (GST)
regime to Rs 40 lakh.
However,
the states will have the option to choose between the two exemption thresholds
of Rs 20 lakh and Rs 40 lakh and will have to intimate their decision within a
week.
The
second decision of the GST council is to increase the
Turnover Limit for availing the existing
Composition Scheme for goods, to Rs. 1.5 crores from
existing 1 crore.
The
special category states comprising of northeastern states, Jammu and Kashmir,
Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand are given one-week time to decide upon the
composition limit in their respective states.
The third
decision is with respect to the Composition scheme for Services, where
the GST council allowed the Service providers and suppliers of both goods and
services up to a turnover of Rs 50 lakh in the preceding financial year to be
eligible to opt for the GST composition scheme and pay a tax of 6 per
cent .
The GST
Councilâs 4th announcement is for making available the Accounting
and Billing Software free of cost to small taxpayers by Goods and
Services Tax Network (GSTN).
The
5th decision of the Council related to MSME is regarding the Revenue
mobilization for natural calamities, allowing Kerala to levy 1 per
cent disaster cess on intra-state sale of goods and services for a period up to
two years to mobilize revenues in order to meet the cost of rehabilitating
parts of the state that were ravaged by floods last year.