Plan to end ST confusion

He explained: "This levy is relatively new; there may be bottlenecks and confusions. If Service Tax assessees such as chartered accountants, company secretaries, stock brokers, the hospitality industry and other assessees are having problems regarding pattern of assessment and assessment we wanted to know about it. The idea is to ascertain what the procedural difficulties and other problems might be."

The government introduced service tax five years back by making provisions in the Finance Act. "Initially Service Tax was introduced for three services — telephones, stock broking and insurance. There were close to 3,500 assesses in services then which yielded about Rs 416 crore in tax. Today there are 26 services (in the Service Tax net) with almost 1,40,000 assesses. We are expecting to collect Rs 2,100 crore this year," said Tampi.

For now, the government is aiming at a massive public relations exercise to "spread the message…, we’d like to have voluntary compliance of the assessment. We expect commensurate response from the assessees," Tampi says.

The Service Tax Director-General informed that the government awareness campaign will include canvassing on Doordarshan, print media and through banners/hoardings.