MANILA: Chua applauds the Customs for taking an ‘inform enforcement’ measure or giving guidelines to companies instead of giving penalties.
Some RM400 million worth of input tax claims has been rejected by the Royal Malaysian Customs since the Goods and Services Tax (GST) was implemented on April 1, 2015, due to lack of understanding of claims’ requirement.
Deputy Finance Minister Datuk Chua Tee Yong said some of the companies are still clueless on the category of industry that can claim for input tax.
“Some of the refunds that got rejected is because they are not valid in the first place. They (the companies) are not even supposed to claim. For example, their industry may be exempt in nature (for claiming the input tax) but they are still claiming the input tax.”
“Another scenario would be some of the input tax claims may be a blocked input tax which means it is allowed to be claimed,” Chua told reporters during a press conference after delivering a keynote address at Post Budget 2016 Dialogue in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.
Chua added some of the claims rejected were also due to errors when filing the tax input.
Chua applauded the Customs for taking an “inform enforcement” measure or giving guidelines to those companies which have filed wrongly, instead of giving penalties.
Since the GST implementation, Chua said the government has refunded RM5 billion of input tax to the companies.
“There is also the perception the government is not refunding. Actually it is not true. The government has refunded RM5 billion to date.
“Only those who were ineligible for the refunds, including companies which were unfit to file GST refunds but still submitted claims request, did not receive any refund,” Chua added.
During his keynote address, Chua said the government is committed to maintaining fiscal consolidation, especially in maintaining its fiscal deficit reduction target.
“There’s a lot of concern whether the government will be able to meet the target of 3.1% fiscal deficit in year 2016. “If you based on the record since 2009 onwards, the government has been able to perform better than expected and meet its fiscal deficit target in four years especially 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012, when the realised deficit is better than the targeted deficit,” said Chua.
