Sakshi Mehra, Symbiosis Law School, Hyderabad
ABSTRACT
Amidst the economic crisis across the globe, India has posed as a beacon of hope by emerging as a ‘survivor economy’ at various instances. The recent reformation of the Indian tax working structure has given the economy a lot of power by mechanizing ease of doing business with the help of the GST regime. The contemporary taxation structure has metamorphosed the Indian economy and can be effectively viewed as an heirloom of the historic 1991 reforms. However, the metamorphosis comes with new challenges for the business to divulge into and forces the companies to have higher levels of compliances. The greatest challenge that the regime had was to ensure that it does not pioneer inflationary crisis and the businesses are not left with undue profits in their fists. Thereby, the legislation introduced the Anti-Profiteering Mechanism to ensure that the resultant benefit reaches the pockets of the consumers.
In the Pre-GST regime from manufacturer to the consumer at every stage there was a different head of indirect tax which failed to provide input tax credit to the businesses resulting into tax being a cost and a heavy burden on the pocket of the consumer and therefore, the GST regime was introduced whereby the indirect taxes were made uniform so that the input tax credit facility can be availed from manufacturer to the consumer at every stage as the head of the tax is common which ultimately reduced the burden of tax being a cost on the pocket of the consumers.
Now, since the tax plaque was removed with the GST legislations, its positive effects were also supposed to be seen clearly in the market. The government became more focused about the fact the burden of cascading effect of tax must be seen through the price of the product and therefore, it became very important to show the effect of the new regime through change of Maximum Retail Price of the products. Therefore, the Anti-Profiteering clauses were observed to be executed by the executive branch of the democracy. However, the success of the Anti-Profiteering clauses remained in question as the new law itself lacked the specific guidelines and penalties and moreover, the executive lacked the administration of new law and the legislature could not apprehend the situations the anti-profiteering law was about to face in the markets of India where GST was being promoted as Good and Bad from both the sides of the democracy.
In the above back drop the researcher aims to the critically analyze the Anti-profiteering mechanism in the GST regime. The paper is based on a comparative studies and interoperation of statues. The researcher aims to address whether Anti-profiteering mechanism is a mere formality in the Indian scenario? Furthmore, the research paper shall provide a comparative analysis of the Anti-profiteering mechanism across the globe and critically analyze the Indian GST regime accordingly. The researcher finally concludes with set of suggestions and recommendations.
Keywords: [Anti-Profiteering Mechanism, GST regime, Indirect Tax, Recommendation’s]
