Service Tax: New guidelines for returns' scrutiny from August

Announcing new guidelines for the manual scrutiny of service tax returns from August 1, the finance ministry on Friday said while scrutiny and anti-evasion work will be the domain of the Central Board of Excise and Customs' executive commissionerates, the recently-separated audit commissionerates will handle the auditing part.

"In view of the legal changes brought about by the Negative List based taxation of services and administrative changes like creation of separate commissionerates for audit etc., these guidelines have been revised and will come into operation from August 1, 2015," said the finance ministry statement.

"The selection of returns for detailed scrutiny would be on the basis of risk parameters which would be centrally generated," it added.

Following Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's budget announcement in February, the rate of service tax has gone up from 12 percent to 14 percent from June 1.

Besides, the earlier levied education cess and secondary and higher education have become ineffective from this date, as they have been subsumed in the service tax rate of 14 percent notified by the Central Board of Direct Taxes.