Major highlights of draft guideline on Goods and service tax

1. Central and state GST will apply on all transaction of goods and services.

2. Tax paid as central GST will be allowed to taken as input tax credit.

3. State GST will also be allowed to be taken as input tax credit.

4. Cross-utilisation of input tax credit not allowed.

5. GST administration to be separate for State and Centre.

6. GST payer to be allotted a unique ID number linked to PAN number

7. Tobacco products also subjected to GST

8. Alcoholic beverages to be kept out of GST and to be taxed at sales tax/VAT rate instead of GST Sales tax to be applied on petroleum products

9. No decision on excluding natural gas from GST

10. “Necessary items” to attract lower GST rate

11. Services to be taxed at a single rate for both centre and state

12. Small traders to be kept out of GST net

13. Businesses with annual turnover below Rs 10 lakh to be exempt from State GST

14. Businesses below annual turnover of Rs 1.5 crore to be exempt from central GST

15. GST to have composition/ compounding scheme to avoid instances of double taxation-Proposes compounding cut-off at Rs 50 lakh of gross annual turnover and floor rate of 0.5% across the states

16. Central and state GST to be applied on goods and services imported

17. GST on imported goods and services to follow destination principle

18. Inter-state transactions to attract Centre and State GST- GST on inter-state transactions can be set off against future transactions

Three-month training to be mandatory after CA course

New Delhi: Accounting regulator, Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), is planning to introduce a three-month mandatory training course for its students who pass the chartered accountancy and accounting technician examination every year. This would mean that a student after qualifying three year chartered accountancy course and one year accounting technician course will have to undergo an additional three months training programme.

ICAI president Uttam Prakash Agarwal said, "At present, the students who are pursuing chartered accountancy course or accounting technician course will not get any in-house training in fields like IT, management, communication skills. The three months training given to the students will help them to cope up in a better manner in the corporate world."

For this the institute is planning to spend around Rs 200 crore in setting up centres of excellence at Jaipur, Jaiselmer, Hyderabad and Bangalore. The purpose of setting up these centres is for organising orientation programmes and providing training in various fields like IT, management and communication skills.

Agarwal further said, "Once the infrastructure is created, we will make the training mandatory for three months as giving a better quality service is the need of the hour." Agarwal also said that apart from the students who pass out every year from the institute, the existing members of ICAI can also join the training programme if they want.

The institute is also planning to conduct training programmes with the regulators like Sebi, Irda, CBDT.

ICAI has introduced a job portal—"jobs4CAs.icai.org" that offers various job opportunities to its members. Agarwal said, "The job portal of ICAI is a portal where one can find the best accounting jobs which would provide world-class and convenient placement services to our chartered accountants and accounting technicians."

At present, the average salary of a chartered accountant is between 6-7 lakh per annum whereas an accounting technician after pursuing one year course gets somewhere around 2-3 lakh per annum.