CII Calls GST Council's Recent Decisions As MSME Friendly

Industry body CII has welcomed the GST Council’s 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 percent.

The GST Council’s 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 percent 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.