One month of GST: Doing business more complicated than ever

Ambiguous rules, multi-rate sales tax have left firms confused on how to price their products

Tax crash course
New Delhi has launched an active outreach programme to educate companies and explain different provisions of the new tax. The exercise has also become a crash course for tax officials in the anomalies of the new tax structure.
Officials have discovered that holiday tour operators are charging the new tax not only for services provided in India but also for those offered abroad.
While vegetable seeds remain tax exempt, paddy, cereal and corn seeds now attract 5 per cent tax. This has hit sales at companies such as Monsanto, whose local seed merchants have no experience of paying tax.
"Our sales are getting hammered at a time when they would normally be booming," Arindam Lahiri, Monsanto's taxation lead in Asia & Africa, told Reuters. "This anomaly needs to be fixed urgently."
Revenue Secretary Hasmukh Adhia, overseeing the GST rollout, tweeted this week that nearly 8 million businesses were enrolled to pay the tax and the transition "is going on smoothly". He did not respond to a request for comment.
But for some companies, it has been anything but smooth...
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