GST Council to discuss model laws on December 22

The GST Council will begin its two-day meeting on Thursday to consider the model GST laws and solve the differences on the vexed issue of jurisdiction over assessees in the new indirect tax regime.

This will be the seventh meeting of the Council, which is headed by Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and has state ministers as members.

With as many as 20 chapters of the model GST law cleared in its last meeting earlier in the month of December, the Council will discuss the remaining 7 chapters on Thursday and then on Friday take up the dual control issue.

As consensus eluded the Council meeting, the subsequent GST legislations -- CGST, IGST and compensation law -- could not be introduced in the Winter session of Parliament that ended last week. This has threatened the April 2017 rollout target of the Goods and Services Tax (GST).

Experts now say that implementation of GST should be postponed by three months to July 2017 as industry would need time to prepare their IT infrastructure.