Tax payer's identification number to be issued soon

JAIPUR: Tax payers all over the country will be assigned a taxpayer identification number (TIN) under the upcoming VAT regime similar to the PAN number. A final design for TIN has already been submitted to the empowered committee of state finance ministers on VAT for adoption.
Rohit Kumar Singh, additional commissioner in the Rajasthan government who heads the group on VAT appointed by the empow-ered committee of state finance ministers told ET that the task for standardising TIN which could be used by all the states had been de-veloped and submitted for approval a few days ago. TIN will comprise three components: (a) a two-alphabet state code; (b) two check digits; and (c) a seven digit serial number.
Thus, TIN for a tax payer in Ra-jasthan would read like RJ276343579. Similarly, a tax payer in Ma-harashtra will use MH followed by nine digits on his TIN. TIN will be the main key for accessing information stored in a database with respect to a particular taxpayer. The process for registering TIN will possibly begin from January, before VAT comes into operation from April next year.
As TIN will be uniform system of identifying a tax payer across the country, it will eliminate the present cumbersome system where companies operating in different states use different registration numbers.
Difficulties faced by the commercial tax depart-ments as a result of different registration numbers will now be tackled through TIN, Mr Singh said. Rajasthan has also been given the task for developing a national VAT information exchange system (VINXSYS) which will facilitate exchange of VAT-related information among states to plug evasion and improve tax compliance.