With the goods and services tax (GST) on the anvil, all state governments are working closely with the central government to put the elaborate information technology (IT) infrastructure in place for smooth handling of massive amount of data.

With the goods and services tax (GST) on the anvil, all state governments are working closely with the central government to put the elaborate information technology (IT) infrastructure in place for smooth handling of massive amount of data, a top Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC) official said at an Assocham event in New Delhi.

“It is going to be a monumental change and a massive task for all the stakeholders — whether it is government, state governments, taxpayers or others,” said S Ramesh, Member (Central Excise, Service Tax and IT), CBEC at a post-Budget seminar.

In his address at the seminar, Abrar Ahmed, Principal Chief Commissioner of Income Tax, Delhi, said, “We should diagnose what are the reasons for India being largely a non-tax compliant country, this is not the responsibility of government alone.” He said the government had limited resources and thus greater cooperation of industry, trade bodies and public at large was required. “Government is doing whatever is possible, so psychology has to be changed because we are non-compliant.”

On the issue of honouring honest taxpayers, he said though there were already many schemes, social security system like in other countries could be intrioduced. “We can discuss (this) with higher authorities as there is no dispute about honouring honest taxpayers.”

He also said that as far as accountability of officers was concerned, there was much more transparency in the present era of RTI (Right to Information) and centralised public grievance redressal and monitoring system.