Kolkata: Hinting that the central government would not be able to introduce the direct tax code (DTC) by April 2013, Parthasarathi Shome, who heads the high-powered committee on General Anti Avoidance Rules (GAAR), Thursday said it needs to go back to the drawing board as some changes are required.
"On the issue of DTC we will have to go back to the drawing board. We felt the requirement of changes in the context of GAAR," Shome said at an interactive session organised by the MCC Chamber of Commerce here.
Stating that there had been a lot of changes in regards to capital gains and SEZ issues, among others, he said DTC should reflect all such changes and thus there was a need for a fresh consultation process to give the proposed tax code its right form.
Although he declined to make comments on whether the dateline of April 2013 for rolling out the proposed tax code would further be postponed to look into the issues in a renewed manner, Shome said it was the government's prerogative to decide whether it should engage more people to work on it to put the review process on a fast track.
According to him, even the Good and Services Tax (GST) has not been ideally structured since petroleum, alcohol and tobacco, which contributed about 60 percent of the total revenue, have been kept out of it.
"It is vitiating structure of GST. I have expressed my views on GST to the parliamentary standing committee on finance," he said.
The government has a plan to rollout the GST by April next year.
IANS
First Published: Thursday, October 11, 2012, 23:58