Finance Bill has been passed by President & has become Act, Finance Act 2015

Pres­i­dent Pranab Mukher­jee has giv­en his assent to the Finance Bill, 2015. It means var­i­ous pro­vi­sions such as the new tax­a­tion norms will now be part of an Act and will be imple­ment­ed accord­ing­ly. Finance Bill 2015 receives assent of pres­i­dent with effect from 14^th may 2015.

Ser­vice Tax

Though the Rate of 14 % Ser­vice tax has been approved by Pres­i­dent ith will not change till its got noti­fied. The Finance Min­istry will noti­fy the date for imple­men­ta­tion of the new rate. ser­vice tax will con­tin­ue to be levied at the rate of 12.36 per cent (inclu­sive of edu­ca­tion cess) till it got notified.

Income Tax Benefit

With the enact­ment of the Finance Bill, var­i­ous tax ben­e­fit pro­vi­sions such as a) increase in the lim­it of deduc­tion in respect of health insur­ance pre­mi­um to Rs. 25,000 from Rs. 15,000 (for senior cit­i­zens the lim­it will stand increased to Rs. 30,000 from the exist­ing Rs. 20,000); b) addi­tion­al deduc­tion of Rs. 25,000 for the dif­fer­ent­ly-abled; and c) Rs. 50,000 invest­ment in the New Pen­sion Scheme (over and above the Rs.1.50-lakh deduc­tion avail­able under Sec­tion 80C of the Income Tax Act), beside oth­ers, will have legal back­ing. All these will be deemed to have come into force on the 1st day of April, 2015.

Merg­er of FMC with SEBI

The enact­ment also for­malis­es the way for­ward for the merg­er of the com­mod­i­ty mar­ket reg­u­la­tor, FMC, with the cap­i­tal mar­ket reg­u­la­tor, SEBI. Now, the Gov­ern­ment will noti­fy var­i­ous dates for imple­men­ta­tion of var­i­ous process­es of the merger.

Under the new mech­a­nism, a com­mod­i­ty deriv­a­tive bro­ker will get three months’ time to get a reg­is­tra­tion from the SEBI. Cur­rent­ly, they are not required to reg­is­ter with FMC.

Post-merg­er, all the recog­nised asso­ci­a­tions (read com­mod­i­ty exchanges) pro­vid­ing trad­ing facil­i­ty in deriv­a­tives trad­ing will be deemed to be recog­nised stock exchanges under the Secu­ri­ties Con­tracts (Reg­u­la­tion) Act, 1956.