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Online vigil to mop up taxes
Without putting additional tax burden on the people, the Telangana government has found a new path to mop up tax revenues for the next fiscal. All the services offered by hospitals, cinema theatres, hotels and restaurants would be brought under ‘mandatory’ online monitoring system to prevent evasion of tax collected from consumers and credit the same to the state exchequer.
Telangana plan to check evasion by theatres, hospitals & hotels
Hyderabad: Without putting additional tax burden on the people, the Telangana government has found a new path to mop up tax revenues for the next fiscal. All the services offered by hospitals, cinema theatres, hotels and restaurants would be brought under ‘mandatory’ online monitoring system to prevent evasion of tax collected from consumers and credit the same to the state exchequer.
To speed up the process, the commercial taxes department has already plunged into action and has taken up an exercise by constituting official committees in the department. Top officials told The Hans India that many loopholes have come to light in the present tax collection system where firms were maintaining records, but there was no regular monitoring on the day-to-day business activity of each registered business entity.
For instance, cinema theatre managements were paying less tax to government by ‘juggling’ the figures of the customers who have visited to watch the films. At present, Rs 80 crore is being collected as tax from 530 theaters across the state. Another Rs 80 crore to Rs 100 crore would be generated additionally once the theater business is streamlined through online monitoring.
Hospitals and hotels have also taken the advantage of the loopholes in the existing mechanism and have been evading payment of taxes to government. It is estimated that government was losing nearly Rs 3,500 crore to Rs 4,000 crore tax revenue due to lack of strict monitoring.
In the proposed fool-proof online monitoring system, each transaction done between consumer and the establishment would be registered immediately online. Officials said taxes being collected from the firms would also be known in advance to the government. The officials said hospitals and hotels which come under the online monitoring would be finalized depending on the annual turnover.
Initially, all corporate hospitals and star hotels would be covered and then extend the new system to small and medium firms in a phased manner. The commercial taxes department has set the revenue target of Rs 42,000 crore, 15 per cent more than that in 2015-16. So far, the commercial taxes department collected Rs 32,000 crore.
