Punjab, Oct. 9 -- The GST Council has taken away the power of GST officers to arrest, and raised the threshold at which a taxpayer can be prosecuted from Rs 1 crore to Rs 5 crore. The decisions came at the Council's 57th meeting in Delhi on Thursday, chaired by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.
What actually changed
Four things, and they are all about process rather than price. The arrest power that GST officers have held since the tax was introduced in 2017 is gone. The prosecution threshold goes up fivefold. The general penalty - the catch-all that applies where the law does not specify one - falls from Rs 25,000 to Rs 10,000. And the minimum punishment has been removed, which means a judge now decides the fine, the imprisonment, or ...