The Committee held its first in-person meeting on Thursday at the Chennai Metro Rail Limited Building, Nandanam, Chennai.
The Committee was constituted to suggest measures for the sustainable augmentation of the State’s Own Tax and Non-Tax Revenues.
At Thursday’s meeting, the Committee heard detailed presentations from the major revenue-generating departments of the State, namely Commercial Taxes, Registration, Prohibition and Excise, the Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation, Transport, Geology and Mining, Water Resources, the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority, Town and Country Planning and the Bureau of Public Enterprises.
Each department placed before the Committee the structure and administration of its revenue head, including the use of information technology, the trend in collection, the buoyancy of the head..
They also presented the longstanding challenges, including leakages, evasion, administrative bottlenecks, the gap between potential and actual revenue, a comparison with the practices in other States, and the possible next steps for revenue augmentation in the short, medium and long term.
KP Krishnan, Chair Professor of Economics at the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER); Arbind Modi, Tax Policy Expert and Convener of the Task Force to Rewrite the Income Tax Act (2017-18); Najib Shah, Former Chairman of the CBEC; MA Siddique, Tamil Nadu Finance Secretary; and .M Suresh Babu,Director, Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, are the members of the Committee.
As per a government order issued earlier, the Committee shall function for a period of three months and shall submit reports and specific recommendations to the Tamil Nadu Finance department within a period of three months.
The Chairperson and the Members of the Committee met Chief Minister Vijay along with the Minister for Finance, Planning and Development Marie Wilson at the Secretariat and appraised them about its proposed course of action.
The Committee had earlier invited suggestions from the public, associations, academicians through e-mail.
The Committee took note of the suggestions received. The Committee discussed the scope of its study, timeline of its report and its future consultations, according to a statement.