The proposal about the change in tax rate or amendment in GST Act, Rules etc. are presented in GST Council meeting and after the necessary approval they are made effective by issue of Notifications by CBIC.
Since the introduction of GST there are number of Notifications, Circular, Order etc. issued by CBIC. A copy of such notifications, circular etc. are made available in https://taxinformation.cbic.gov.in/ . The notifications, circulars etc. are available for reading online as well as they can be downloaded in PDF for future reference of the taxpayer, tax professional etc. The notifications are also available in Hindi version in addition to English.
This tax information site can be directly visited by hitting on the weblink https://taxinformation.cbic.gov.in/.
The said site can also be visited from CBIC site https://www.cbic.gov.in/ — > GST menu — > Act, Rules, Forms, Notifications, Circulars, Orders, Instructions. This will take you the tax information website.
In the tax information website under the category option there are heading like Central Tax, Central Tax (Rate), Integrated Tax, Integrated Tax (Rate), Union Territory Tax, Union Territory Tax (Rate), Compensation Cess, Compensation Cess (Rate).
Upon selection of the desired category and year the Notification gets filtered in the search table. Similarly from the Circulars menu, Instructions/Guidelines and Order menu the required document can be fetched for reading online as well as can be downloaded in PDF.
As on today (06.11.2022) CBIC has published 907 Notifications, 195 Circulars, 23 Instructions and 19 Orders.
The above statistics indicates that the GST law got amended multiple times in last 5 years’ time. Thanks to GST Council and CBIC to amend the GST Laws based on taxpayer representation to ease GST compliance. Some amendments were made by CBIC based on their experience from default taxpayers. Some of the amendments were also made by CBIC on their own to augment tax revenue.
One notification is amended multiple times. For instance GST Rate Notification no. 1/2017-CTR dated 28.06.2017 is amended 20 times since 2017. The first amendment was made vide Notification no. 18/2017-CTR dated 30.06.2017 and last amendment was made vide Notification no. 6/2022-CTR dated 13.07.2022.
In CBIC website, all notifications are available online as well as PDF with a foot note in every notification with information about the last amended notification number and the original notification number. With the help of such reference the back track of the amendments can be done. However, sometime it becomes very difficult to read all the notification. In the above example, reading 20 notifications to find out the applicable GST rate on a particular product is a challenging task.
Apart from the notification, circular issued by Central Govt. there are notification, circular issued by respective State as well. However since the notification issued by States are merely a replication of notification issued by Central Govt. their tracking is not required as such. But assuming if the same is also warranted then the total number of notification, circular etc. issued so far would be 34,320 (1144*30 states). A sea of notifications.
States are required to replicate the Notification issued by Central Govt. but, yet some states are making some change in the notification. For instance, the threshold limit of e-way bill compliance is Rs.50,000/- in the Central Govt. notification whereas the States such as Maharashtra, Bihar, Rajasthan have increased the limit to Rs 1,00,000. Such notification need to be tracked separately state wise.
Looking into the number of times the Law is amendment which made compliance complicated it can be said that the GST Law is definitely a Good law but surely it is not a Simple law.
Author Bio
