)
The finance ministry, on Wednesday, said it would put in the public domain its road map to eliminate all tax exemptions and incentives for corporates in the next 45 days, as a precursor to lowering corporate tax rate to 25 per cent over a four-year period from the current 30 per cent.
Revenue Secretary Shaktikanta Das said, "We are now working on the elimination of exemptions and incentives and some time in the next 45 days or so, we will be spelling out the road map for removal of exemptions and incentives." By unveiling roadmap, the ministry hopes to get feedback from stakeholders. Explaining the rationale for the reduction of corporate tax in a phased manner, Das said the government would have been happy to do it immediately, but there were fiscal issues to attend to.
"The fiscal deficit is sacrosanct and cannot be compromised, so there is the whole issue of affordability in a single year. You cannot reduce the tax from 30 per cent to 25 per cent," he said.
On indirect tax reforms, Das said the GST Bill is before the select committee of Parliament and "work is in progress".
"We are also looking at the kind of rates that will be prevalent in GST. We have constituted one more committee recently to work out the feasibility of what kind of rates GST should have," he said.
