“From state governments’ perspective, they would want direct access to taxpayers’ data as opposed to waiting for the Centre to perform assessments and verifications and trust the Centre to allocate funds to the state. If securities are taxed as goods, it allows the government to track its trading more efficiently under GST. Else, they would have to build a complex place of supply rules for capturing all the various activities around trade in securities.”

Amit Kumar Sarkar
Partner, Grant Thornton India LLP

This article apeared in Business Standard on 05th November, 2016.