chambers of commerce and industry

The Union governments move to suspend Accounting Standards 11, allowing companies to show foreign currency liabilities as assets, has come under the Bombay high courts scanner. The petition filed by an organisation of city-based legal experts, Just Society, has claimed that this permits firms that might otherwise be sick to paint a rosy picture . Full Article

India is drafting new rules to avail the services of private information technology (IT) firms for a range of government functions such as collecting taxes or issuing birth certificates, allowing transactions to be conducted electronically or through mobile phones, which are more pervasive in the country than computers. Full Article

The services/activities provided by the American Institute to DRDO pursuant to the agreement entered into between FICCI and the American Institute do not fall within the purview of Article 12(4)(b) of the Indo-US DTAA and the payments received by the Institute under the agreement are not liable to be taxed as fees for technical services under the domestic law; consequently, FICCI is not required to deduct tax under section 195 for payments made by it to the American Inst.. Full Article

India can surpass China as a global production hub for consumer durables with rationalisation of tax structure and policy support from the government, says a study by industry body Ficci and financial consultancy company PricewaterhouseCoopers. The study suggested tax rebates for high-end technology companies that set up research and development centres in India . Full Article

If the Value Added Tax (VAT) is considered to be a major improvement over the pre-existing Central excise duty at the national level and the sales tax system at the State level, then the Goods and Services Tax (GST) will be a further significant breakthrough - the next logical step - towards a comprehensive indirect tax reform in the country. Full Article

Citing serious fiscal situation, Union Commerce Secretary Rahul Khullar said that no new incentives and sops could be provided to exporters in the next fiscal in view of significant resource crunch faced by Centre. Khullar tersely told a meeting of exporters last night that the current fiscal situation was so serious that it was not going to be a temporary problem in terms of resource-crunch. Full Article