List of tax exemptions to be phased out in few days: Jaitley

Jaitley was speaking at 'India Summit 2015' organised by UK-based Economist magazine.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Wednesday said the government would soon bring out a list of tax exemptions to be phased out as part of the exercise to reduce corporate tax rate to 25% in the next four years.

The minister also said that measures to protect domestic steel sector from dumping by overseas manufacturers are being examined.

Stating that every tax demand cannot be termed as tax terrorism, he said the government won't relent on pursuing black money in India or abroad.

As regards his Budget announcement of reducing corporate tax rate to 25%, Jaitley said: "Over the next few days, we will come out with list of exemptions, which we intend to phase out in the first place. In the next four years, corporate tax will come down by 5% and lot of exemptions will get phased out.

"Therefore slowly we will bring taxation levels to global standards and make taxation assessment and return simpler by just eliminating a lot of exemptions", Jaitley added.

Jaitley was speaking at 'India Summit 2015' organised by The Economist.

The Finance Minister in his 2015 Budget had announced that the government would reduce the rate of corporate tax from 30% to 25% over the next four years to align the rates with competing countries.

In view of surge in import of various categories of steel, the Directorate General of Safeguards (DGS) has already initiated an inquiry into the imports of steel from China, Korea, Japan and Russia.