Ramp up tax-GDP ratio: VP

Hyderabad: Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu said the country needed to significantly ramp up its tax to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ratio to give shape to a modern and 21centruy government. This was important for the country to offer basic public goods and to provide social security to the citizens, he said.

He was speaking as the chief guest at the inaugural session of a two-day national seminar on ‘Contemporary Issues and Challenges in Finance, Marketing and Taxation’, organised by the Department of Commerce, Keshav Memorial Institute of Commence and Sciences, here on Tuesday.

He termed the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) as the biggest ever tax reform since Independence, adding, “India has finally become one-country and one market.” It also demonstrated the victory of a bipartisanship in the democratic and federal setup of the country. The GST, in its application, had made compliance easy for business and traders and lead to further improvement of Ease of Doing Business (EDB) in the country.

Naidu pointed out, “India’s tax to GDP ratio was 16.6 per cent in FY2017 when compared with 26.0 per cent in the USA, 20.1 per cent in China, and 34.3 per cent in OECD countries.” This calls for taking up significant efforts to ramp up its tax to GDP ratio, to fuel a modern and 21st-century government. In turn, this would help offer basic public goods and to provide social security to the people, he added.

Giving the development in the aftermath of introduction of the GST, Naidu said direct taxes collected in FY2018 had grown at 18.2 per cent. This increase in the collection was driven by an increase in compliances with the increase of the number of taxpayers in both the direct and indirect taxes. About 5.9 million tax-payers had registered for GST and 28.2 million people had filed their income-tax returns for the FY2017, he said.

Stressing on the need to keep check on black money, the Vice President said demonetisation, constituting Special Investigation Team (SIT) on black money and passing of the Benami Transactions Act, 1988 were some of the strong steps taken to bring more economic activity into the tax net, he said.