Hyderabad: The commercial tax department has many reasons to worry about, if one goes by lacklustre collections that it has been reporting for the last four months.
Though the department, which collects state GST, has greater manpower, in April posted a 4.8 per cent growth in its collections, compared to 16 per cent growth posted by the Central GST. Similarly, SGST growth was 10.2 per cent compared to 15 per cent in CGST in May. In June, SGST growth had shrunk by two per cent compared to 9.5 per cent of CGST. In July, SGST saw a growth of 2.5 per cent as against CGST’s nine per cent.
Interestingly, the department had achieved a 13 per cent growth rate in 2023, which was better than CGST’s 10 per cent.
Observers attribute the lacklustre performance to some measures like the sudden mass transfer of taxpayers from one circle to the other on the basis of area, as opposed to the equitable distribution of number of taxpayers adopted earlier. This measure resulted in some circles having 7,000 to 8,000 taxpayers, while some have just 800.
The skewed distribution of work to circles with a similar staffing pattern has overburdened some of them while denying work to others, and also consumed time in adjustment in the new jurisdictions.
Further, the tax assessment notices issued for FY-2019-20 would get barred by limitation by the end of this month. If notices are not issued before the deadline, they would become infructuous; they have to be issued by the same officer who is going to pass the final orders These precarious cases involve tax estimates of nearly Rs 7,000 crore.
The bid to register new businesses with less than Rs 20 lakh per annum turnover led to loss of man hours in July 2024. Added to this, CGST officials addressed a letter to the state GST officials demanding details of the CID case into the Rs 1,400-crore alleged GST scam and have sought their share of Rs 700 crore. They have also sought names of businesses facing allegations.
