Updates from F4F

The Reserve Bank of India’s Reference Rate on October 3, 2009 for the US dollar is Rs. 47.04 for Euro is Rs. 69.61 The corresponding rates for the previous day (October 30, 2009) were Rs. 46.96 and Rs. 69.65 respectively.

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India’s exports remained downhill for 12 months in a row, declining by 13.8 per cent to $13.6 billion in September, but the damage to exports inflicted by recession in big markets seems to be bottoming out. Due to a sharp drop in crude oil prices to $76 per barrel from a peak of $147 per barrel last year, the country’s imports fell by a drastic 31.3 per cent in September this year to $21.3 billion. As a result, the country’s trade gap narrowed to $7.7 billion against $15.3...

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The extra freedom given to the 26 public sector banks from this year to choose their statutory auditors has auditing companies — both those chosen and those left out — restive. The have approached the Union finance ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office to say that the decision will affect the quality of audits. The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), which has been representing against this shift in policy for quite a while, has done likewise. The banks, however, reject this...

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Having failed to detect the Satyam scam, the government has embarked on a new vigilant system to track corporate frauds as part of which it has decided to look into companies whose financials are found to be suspicious. According to an official in the ministry of corporate affairs, the government’s new drive would be technology-driven and bank heavily on the MCA21 e-governance programme that is now the main gateway for corporates to file their statutory documents. “This is part of...

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The government today said it is looking at steps to cut subsidy on fertiliser and oil sale with an aim to cutting non-Plan expenditure and contain fiscal deficit. Addressing the economic editors’ conference, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said that the fiscal deficit would be rolled back to 5.5 per cent in the next financial year from 6.8 per cent in 2009-10. However, he said stimulus packages given to industry last year would continue. He said a few more PSUs have been identified for...

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The government may retain profit as the key condition for levying minimum alternate tax (MAT) in the final draft of the direct taxes code after its asset-based approach proposed earlier ran into a storm of protests from industry. Other options being considered by the government include tax exemptions for asset-heavy infrastructure companies and start-ups, and a lower rate for MAT, a senior government official told ET. The proposed direct taxes code, which was unveiled by the government in...

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Amid fears that Goods and Services Tax (GST) implementation will miss the deadline, a leading consultancy firm PiceWaterHouseCoopers (PwC) has said the Centre and states are yet to reach an agreement on major issues relating to the new tax regime. “Agreement is yet to be reached on major issues such as the treatment of inter-state supplies of goods and services, imposition of GST on imports,” said a PwC report. The GST is scheduled to be introduced from April 1, 2010. However,...

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