CM Laxmikant Parsekar is confident that Goa will pas the GST Bill during a special session on August 31.
The Goa Assembly will convene for a day-long special session on August 31 to ratify the Goods and Services Tax (GST).
"The state cabinet has already granted its nod to the GST and we will summon a one-day special session to ratify it," Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar said.
During the Goa Assembly's recently concluded monsoon session, Mr Parsekar had welcomed the passage of the GST Bill in the parliament, saying that the tax reform would be helpful to Goa, which is a tourist state. An early proponent of the GST, Mr Parsekar had earlier said that all opposition to the GST in Goa was politically motivated and lacked economic reasoning.
The GST Bill aims to simplify tax collection in the country by replacing multiple indirect taxes with a single tax, and thus increasing the ease of doing business. On August 8, during the parliamentary debate on GST Bill, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said that the tax reform was absolutely "crucial" for reducing corruption and the incidence of black money in the country.
Being a constitutional amendment, the GST Bill will have to be ratified by at least 15 state legislatures before it becomes a law. Only after being ratified by the states, will the GST Council decide on new tax rates. The Centre has announced April 2017 as the deadline for complete rollout of the GST.
Earlier today, Madhya Pradesh became the seventh state to pass the GST Bill, after it convened a special session today for this purpose. Assam was the first state to ratify the Bill, while Bihar became the first non-NDA state to do so after Chief Minister Nitish Kumar counted the virtues of the tax reform.