The day after the Budget, 2012 was presented by Pranavda in the Parliament, I bumped into Herambha Shastri.
After Hi, Hello, How are you rituals, Herambha broached the Budget issue. I was reluctant to discuss.
As a run-up to his commentary on the Budget he said, “If a human being dies, it is believed that to fulfil his unfulfilled wishes he becomes ghost. It means he or she exists even after death so we experience ghost effect sometimes.”
I could not help but ask Herambha, “I didn’t get the hang of what are you referring to?” Herambha clarified “It’s all about ghost; I mean ghost of retrospective amendments by Pranavda, 50 years backward effect, utter nonsense!”
“Retrospective amendment is required to plug revenue leakage” I said, adding fuel to the fire. “What revenue leakage? Past or future?” queried Herambha. “Of course future!” said I. “How innocent you are! My dear friend Pranavda and his battery of babu colleagues are trying to reduce the ‘deficit’ of past several budgets through these ghost amendments you know. It is beyond anybody’s imagination.
You are aware once you squeeze the toothpaste, you cannot put it back in the tube, but our Finance Minister — Pranavda is a superman; he can do it with retrospective amendments, 50 years backward!” elaborated Herambha. I was just staring at Herambha nodding my head. What else could I say?
“Apart from this, retrospective amendments are also useful to plug administrative undoing in the Income-tax Department. If action could not be taken in the past due to limitation of time, bring retrospective amendment extending the time limit. So taxpayers or rather their consultants have sleepless nights after every budget presentation. It is not just a hanging sword but the sword about to hit on your neck. Look at the functioning of bureaucrats working in the Income-tax Department and the plethora of reassessments initiated after retrospective amendments.”
“Have you ever come across any retrospective amendment in any Budget in favour of taxpayers requiring the government to pay back the tax collected in the past? If there is one, it would be the rarest of rare amendment so far” said Herambha in one breath. While concluding his reaction to budget he remarked,
“My dear friend, it is normal practice as a prologue to the Budget, the Finance Minister talks about government’s spending in the coming year on various sectors of the economy like industry, agriculture and infrastructure, so on so forth and on various projects. With announcement of each project, the stock market in the country goes up or down, industry leaders on various channels puff their views, favourable or unfavourable. I think all these rituals should be scrapped since eventually most of the government spending goes into scams and scandals running into lakhs of crores leaving the country’s economy in lurch and making the Aam Aadmi’s day-to-day life difficult. So it is useless to make those announcements on the floor of the House. Instead the Finance Minister should just introduce Direct and Indirect Tax Bill on the floor of the House and sit down. What do you say?”
