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Tax anomalies to be redressed, says revenue secretary

The government today said the tax anomalies in the union Budget 1999-2000 will be addressed through better enforcement of safeguard laws and levy of anti-dumping duties.

The main threat to the industries that are asking for tax exemptions is through external competition and it will be nullified by "more efficient use of anti-dumping duties and safeguard laws," said Revenue Secretary Javed Chaudhary.

The government should not be expected to correct each and every instance of inverted tax structure. Otherwise, the whole Budget would be affected, he said.

Addressing a national workshop on the Union Budget, organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry in New Delhi, Chaudhary assured that the tax anomalies would be corrected "over a period of time, perhaps over the next two budgets".

Discussing the government's efforts to widen the tax base, which covers just 1.5 per cent of the total population, the revenue secretary said efforts are on to tap the incomes of farmhouse owners and providers of expensive services.

"The tax base ideally should be three to four crore (30-40 million) people or 3-4 per cent of the population and we are working towards that," he said.

However, the government would not wait for the annual budget for increasing the number of taxpayers. "It is an ongoing process to widen the tax base and any step that does not require legislative changes would be introduced even mid-year," he told reporters after the workshop.

Earlier, the revenue secretary assured the industrialists that there would be "no devils in the fine print. The concessions given for housing and capital markets are all given upfront."

He said the budget has set a "fairly conservative target of revenue collection" which the government is confident of realising.

Moreover, the government will mop the additional Rs 94 billion in revenue since most of it comes through a single measure of imposing a levy of Re one on diesel.

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