The Commercial Taxes Department has developed a bouquet of apps that has resulted in fewer tax-payers evading the payment of tax or filing of returns.
Be it the Official in Charge (OIC) app, Revenue Drive or the Function Hall apps, they help the Department in keeping a tab on the income of the traders, dealers and service providers and send alerts to their mobile phones about the payable tax.
Special Chief Secretary, Revenue, Somesh Kumar spoke of the apps, the action plan of the Department and how it was reorganised to keep a check on tax-payers through data analytics to improve tax compliance at the national conference on ‘GST- Unresolved Issues and Agenda for the New Government’ organised by the ASSOCHAM here on Friday.
Interestingly, the department has developed an app to track the turnover of function halls given the number of lavish weddings that take place in the city and elsewhere. But less than ₹1 lakh tax is paid to the department by the function hall managements, while 18% of the total expenditure incurred should be paid as GST. The app would help in showing the number of events that take place in each hall, the vendors who work for an event, the turnout, the amount charged for each plate of food and the décor. Once the data is collected, the Commercial Taxes Department would convene a meeting and present it before them for revised tax payment, said Mr. Kumar.
Tax-compliant
The Special Chief Secretary said there was significant improvement in tax collection in Telangana as well as across the country as people have become more compliant under the new Goods and Services Tax regime.
Praising the GST for widening the tax base, Mr. Kumar said the collection during the earlier tax regime was ₹3,000 crore a month in Telangana, but in the new tax regime, it has already crossed ₹3,400 crore this month.
Earlier, T.V. Sandeep Reddy, chairman of Telangana State Development Council of the ASSOCHAM, and managing director of Gayatri Projects, said with the GST bringing about positive change in tax-payers’ behaviour and widening the tax base in a short span of time, they hope to see more rationalisation of the rate structure in the coming years.
Chairman of Taxation Council of the FTCCI Ananthanarayanan S., said tax compliance was bound to improve further as the government has much more data to monitor the income of the tax-payers than the tax-payers themselves.