Bihar commercial taxes department has initiated a market survey to ascertain whether the consumers are getting the benefits of GST rate reduction from 28 per cent to 18 per cent on a wide range of products of daily used items.
During the survey, the officers would identify on which products the tax rate has been reduced and whether or not the benefit of tax cut is being passed on to the consumers, the department's commissioner-cum-principal secretary Sujata Mathur said here.
"We have been receiving complaints that benefits of tax rate cut are not being passed on to the consumers by the dealers. We have been receiving such information from across the country that consumers are not getting benefits of tax cut and hence the department has initiated a market survey in this regard," she told reporters here.
The GST council at its Guwahati meeting on November 10 had reduced tax rate to 18 per cent from current 28 per cent slab on around 178 daily use items.
Mathur, accompanied by Addititional Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Mawandiya and Additional Secretary Arun Mishra at the press meet, asked people to lodge their complaints if they are charged more than prescribed tax rate or do not get the benefit of slashed tax.
The people can lodge their complaints with 'state level screening committee' set up under Anti-profiteering Committee of GST, she said adding they can do so through e-mail, phone and fax.
The Commercial Taxes Commissioner admitted that there was an initial slide in the revenue collection post-GST in Bihar because of technical and some initial teething problems in the implementation of the tax. But now the department has registered a growth of 9 per cent in revenue collection in the first seven months of current fiscal over the corresponding period of last fiscal 2016-17.
The department raked in Rs 8861.01 crore as revenue collections during April-October of the current fiscal against Rs 8115.59 crore in the same period of last fiscal 2016-17, she said and hoped it will improve in months to come.
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