Article - 44 Week 1 Service tax system in shipping industry:

Article - 44 Week 1

Service tax system in shipping industry:

The contempt for freedom to free transactions in a free market with free people still hangs heavy on our administration & polity. It is still difficult to tell if the policies preach one thing and the administration practices another. RTI is a potential weapon to peer into the ugly notations on dusty & crumby administrative files. But that is no guarantee to a fair & legitimate justice to the public, unless it is sensational enough to ruffle TRP. 

Let us see the Service Tax system in our shipping industry. There is barely any thing left alone from the gigantic 10.2% Service Tax slap. From the industry perspective : "What the heck, the Indian public has to pay"  Fair enough for the industry and bad enough for the little Indian. Let's see how easy it is to pay your service tax. To register yourself, you will be asked a mountain of documents to furnish and fill up such obscure forms, that does not shy away to ask your great grand mothers name - figuratively! Up to that point it is bearable, being used to such administrative tyranny for far too long. Then your applications keep getting rejected, until such time that you pay bribe & grease. In other words you have to pay bribe to be eligible to pay your taxes, with honest intentions. Simply speaking, you have to buy honesty with bribes. 

I am talking about an instance, where the application for registering into a centralised service tax has taken more than one year. The babus comes out with asking one document after the other. They keep finding missing 'dot' & 'commas' in the submitted documents and sit on the files. The basic idea being, the longer they take to register, the more bribe they can demand for violation of payments for the intervening periods. As an honest law abiding citizen, you have practically no option left. If you go to the appellate, they would start by demanding a mountain of documents along with your grand mothers name and residence address proof and then would invariably stand by the black sheep. If you go to court, the court would ask you to first deposit the claimed amounts by the babus in court's custody and proceed to examine your case. That may take years and at times decades. Keep in mind that, you want to pay your taxes and the system is not registering you. If you are still not broke by paying your lawyers and consultants, the only possible option for you is to bribe the officials heavily and doctor your books the way the babus want you to. Or you quit! Who in interested in an ordinary citizen in this country anyway?

And if you pay a big bribe in the beginning itself and dig some connections into the departments, you are a hero in their eyes. Or else, you can hire a dalla  or euphemistically called a tax consultant  to do this for you. 

The disgraced CVC chief, Mr Thomas, says that the people who pay bribes are also responsible for corruption. Has he ever been in our shoes to look at the black & crooked administration? Do we have a genuine choice Mr Thomas?

For more & unedited versions, please visit & leave your opinions on, http://ourships.blogspot.com/

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Brgds

Capt Rath

Econship Marine

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