Service Tax

The existence of a differentiating line between goods and services has always been the matter of spirited academic debate. Questions as to whether air conditioner manufacturers sell goods or cooling solutions have always surfaced among marketing men. Financial intermediaries call their services financial products. Therefore it is only apposite to bring more services into the tax net and align services and excise taxation regimes. This is being actively mulled upon in policy circles providing importance and flux to service tax.

The flux has resulted in sweeping changes in service tax legislation ever since it was first introduced in 1994. The issue of alignment adds its own facilitations and challenges (as seen in the unified CENVAT Credit Rules). Service tax is administered in most cases by excise jurisdictions and service tax assesses outnumber those of central excise. This leads to increased regulatory pressures and underscores the cause of voluntary compliance.

KORE tax is IT enabled and such frequent changes can be easily configured into the system giving peace of mind to the management over tax compliances.

Our compliance services include:  

•   Automated computation of service tax liability applying tax positions taken by      clients in an IT enabled framework
•    Automated generation of payment instruments (challans) and returns
•    System driven maintenance of CENVAT credit registers factoring the       complexities of:
      o    Transfer of CENVAT credit etc.
     o    Interplay on account of excise levies
•    Handling specific processes pertaining to:
     o    Input service distributors such as maintaining records of credit transferred           across registered premises
     o    Premises with centralized accounting / billing systems insofar as           reporting needs of premises that come under the centrally registered           premise
•    Export of services and corresponding claims of rebate
•    Handling reverse charges of service tax
•    Tracking differential liability in cases of provisional assessments

Business rules of the IT enabled offering are derived from service tax notifications issued by the Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC), service categories listed under the Finance Act and the CENVAT Credit and Service Tax Rules serve as the foundation of our services and are synchronized with latest releases by CBEC.

MANAGED SERVICES

We ensure a smooth transition from the client’s own environment to a managed services one. In doing so we perform a detailed transition exercise and train client personnel on the new IT enabled environment.

Once the transition period is over and system procedures are set a pilot run is conducted involving execution of processes designed for the managed services operations, running parallel to the current processes. The objective would be to achieve process level consistencies in the collaborative environment without disrupting existing operations. Thereafter the operations team takes the ownership to provide consistent service tax compliance in a collaborative environment.

ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE

Our software certification with SAP confirms the existence of product features of KORE Tax platform in accordance with the SAP certification procedure and attests to the fact that BMS provides open, interoperable and collaborative technology allowing it to flexibly integrate with SAP. This is set to expand with efforts on collaborating with other leading enterprise systems in the recent future.

KORE 2.0 is ready for immediate installation at the customer site with minimum of implementation efforts. It starts with an initial tax process review to determine all the list of all data and information needs and study of the underlying service tax transactions and collation of necessary information for the entire set of compliance functions. The flow of financial information and data feed from the existing IT Systems (Software    applications, financial modules and accounting systems) is determined at this stage.

Implementation is done to configure the masters and design the related processes and procedures. Training of key personal is provided to acquaint with the system. Relevant technical and functional updates will be provided to the client along with major version change.

We assign a team that is completely conversant with nuances of service tax and ensure that committed service levels are strictly adhered to.