Centre, States to hold 100 per cent Share in GSTN

Standard Operating Procedure - GSTN Registration - Crosses - Taxscan

The 27th GST Council meeting decided to buy back fifty one per cent stakes in GSTN. As per the council decision, Centre-States will hold equal stake in the Company.

The States will hold the 51 percent shares on pro-rata basis. “The Council also recommended GSTN to employ people contractually and to get the best talent from the market considering the wide range of activities of the GSTN itself,” Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said while addressing the media after the meeting.

This is done with a motive of the drive out the fear regarding the ownership of those company which handles IT infrastructure and systems related to the Goods and Services Tax, should reside with the state.

Earlier, the Finance Minister while reviewing the files reportedly opinioned that government should be the repository of the data provided by companies so that there is no fear of a data breach.

Currently, 51% of ownership in GST Network is in the hands of the private financial institution. So the Government executed the plan to reduce the controlling stake from private parties and making more participants from their side. This is mainly done with an object of sensitive GST data should not reside in private hands.

The process of taking the stake in GSTN by the government is a long pending one and many more political parties questioned the sense of controlling and handling the critical data’s off in India’s tax process being vested with private entities.

Presently central government and state government having 24.5% each stake of shareholding in GSTN while the rest of shareholding are HDFC (10%), HDFC Bank (10%), ICICI Bank (10 %), NSE Strategic Investment Company (10 %) and LIC Housing Finance Limited (11 %).

GSTN has been primarily established with an authorized capital of Rs.10 crore and UIDAI chairman Ajay Bhushan Pandey is its chairman.

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