Saturday, June 27, 2009

GST records adds to cost of doing business

The owner of a small business told me that the keeping of tax invoices to support GST has added to his cost of doing business. He has to keep separate records for the purpose of GST, which is additional to the records for preparing his accounting statements.

Do you agree with this view? If you are runnning a business that needs to comply with GST or have any friends in this situation, please share your views here.
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3 comments:

Singapore Short Stories said...

Its inevitable...records have to be kept for auditing purposes as per government's usual practice. But I think beyond a certain number of years, the older records can be disposed.

June 27, 2009 9:20 AM
Anonymous said...

Well, as long as the Govt is not having to keep the records, what is a little trouble to business.

In fact the publis is now doing a lot of the leg work, paper work and time lost, doing a lot of things which in the old days are done by Government employees. So they are able to reduce their staffing numbers.

And the credit still goes to the Government for being lean,
efficient and productive.

Can you argue with that? Nah!

Lost Citizen

June 27, 2009 2:32 PM
Anonymous said...

I run a small business and completely agree with the sentiment. What is worse are the trigger happy officers who will happily hand you $200 composition fines if you are late with your submission.

Fortunately it is quite easy to escape GST. All you have to do is incorporate in another tax jurisdiction and bill out of your company there. Given that the GST is 7%, this can result in considerable savings. As a result of this, GST is legally "avoided" for many B2B transactions. I suspect that the bulk of GST collections come from B2C transactions (egwhen you buy your groceries from NTUC). It is therefore a very regressive form of taxation.

June 29, 2009 10:28 AM

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