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Employees suffering injury in industrial accident will now get compensation of up to Rs 1 lakh, with Parliament on Wednesday clearing a Bill in this regard.The Employees Compensation (Amendment) Bill also hasaprovision for hefty penalty in case of any violation by the employers. 06TH APRIL,2017,BUSINESS STANDARD,NEW-DELHI

Expatriates who have stayed for at least 182 days in India a year before July 1, 2017, need to apply for Aadhaar if they are filing tax returns in the country.Else, they would have to file returns by June 30 this year.  The income tax (IT) department clarified that foreign nationals who stayed less than 182 days need not quote the Aadhaar number in their I-T returns.  According to the Aadhaar Act, 2016, those who have stayed in India for at least 182 days (almost six months) inayear preceding the date of application for Aadhaar are considered residents. The requirement of mandatorily quoting the Aadhaar number is effective from July 1. This means that those who have stayed in India for more than almost six months between June 30, 2016, and July 1, 2017, need to quote their Aadhaar number. Thus, those who were in India for at least 182 daysayear prior to July 2017 and are required to file income tax returns will need to get Aadhaar.If these expatriates have left India, they...

The share of financial products purchased online is low at present, but this is set to change with the introduction of centralised  and Aadhaar-based KYC Sample this: Life Insurance Corporation of India’s (LIC) e-Term policy’s annual premium is Rs 23,861. The same policy, called Jeevan Amulya, bought offline will cost Rs 38,640 a year. Clearly, there is a huge benefit if policies are bought online. But online sales account for only a small proportion of the total policies sold by insurance companies. In case of life insurance, online sales contributed only 0.22 per cent of new business premium in 2015-16 if both individual and group businesses are included, and 0.52 per cent for individual business only (source: IRDA’s annual report, 2015-16). In health insurance, online sales contributed  only two per cent of gross premium (source: Handbook of Indian Insurance Statistic, 2015-16). In case of mutual funds, a recent report from Karvy says that according to its data online s...

Effective April 1, banks have to set aside higher provisions for loans given to highly indebted companies, the system wide limit for which is set at Rs 25,000 crore for the financial year 2017-18. Banks are not comfortable with this move, and some of them have asked the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to go easy on the provisioning part. The limit of indebtedness comes down to Rs 15,000 crore from 2018-19, and then Rs 10,000 crore from April 2019 onwards.Beyond these limits, the RBI wants banks to invest in debt instruments issued by the companies, rather than giving them loans directly. But, under the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) norms, banks won´t get any relief on any kind of exposure to indebted companies, be it loans or investing in their bonds.Banks, therefore, have requested the RBI to give them more time, even as they welcome the idea of letting the companies tap the bond market. “For stressed companies, banks are anyway incurring heavy provisioning.And we...

CBDT clears the air in the backdrop of ban on cash transactions of more than Rs 2 lakh a day The ban on cash transactions of more than Rs 2 lakh a day will not apply to withdrawals from banks, post office savings accounts and cooperative banks, the Central Board of Direct Taxes said. The Finance Act 2017 prescribed to impose a penalty equal to the transacted amount on those who violated the rule restricting cash transactions. It provides that no one can deal in cash in excess of Rs 2 lakh a single day, in respect of a single transaction or transactions relating to one event or occasion. The restrictions will also not apply to any receipt by government, banking company, post office savings bank and cooperative bank, the CBDT said in a statement. A notification will be issued to implement this change. To curb large cash transactions and discourage black economy, finance minister Arun Jaitley had in the 2017-18 budget proposed to ban transaction of over Rs 3 lakh a day. This...

If gold attracts 12% tax under GST, total tax may work out to be 22% as import duty is 10% Gold may become costlier for Indians if the government accepts chief economic advisor Arvind Subramanian's suggestion to put the yellow metal in the 12% tax bracket under GST. With an import duty of 10%, tax on gold may turn out to be 22%, which will reduce its consumption in the physical form in the second largest gold consuming nation in the world. At present, gold attracts an import duty of 10%. In addition, there is a VAT of 1% and an excise duty of 1%.“For a healthy development of trade, GST and import duty combined should not cross 12%; ideally, i t should be in the range of 10 - 12 % ,“ Shekhar Bhandari, business head for global transaction (banking and precious metals), Kotak Mahidnra Bank, told ET. Late last year, there was agreement on five broad GST slabs -0 (the exempted category), 5%, 12%, 18%, and 28%. While retailers and jewellers want the government to peg GST at 1.25%...