GST will probably be one of the biggest reforms for India and one of the biggest tax overhaul for India since independence.  A simplified tax structure and effective governance will mean making India an attractive destination for doing business. This will also help make India a “one country”, as movement of goods and services across states will be seamless.

Businesses are yet to get fully ready, though work is taking place at a frenetic pace to ensure readiness. For enterprises, this also means strategizing and consolidating their supply chain for lowering overall costs and maximizing overall benefit. In the next few months, we will definitely see a lot of initial ruffles, similar to what happened with demonetization. Understanding and fully complying with the new policy requires trainings for personnel and ensuring process readiness in addition to technology and supply chain readiness. It would be interesting to see how the anti-profiteering laws would get implemented especially in the context that GST would have an impact across various business processes of an enterprise and determining all tax benefits could be an arduous task. Again, filing of close to three or four returns per state per month would mean immense amount of paperwork and related processes. These and several other change management issues will take time to settle in before the real benefits of GST can kick in.