Guwahati: Senior finance department officials said on Saturday that Assam is open to reviewing the goods and services tax (GST) threshold limit for businesses but only after the new regime stabilises.

The response came after Union finance minister Arun Jaitley announced on Friday that states were at liberty to increase the GST threshold limit on their own. He had cited the example of Jammu and Kashmir which had recently raised the exemption limit.

Jaitley's remark, which came at the end of the GST council meeting here, prompted the Federation of Industries and Commerce of Northeastern Region (Finer), the apex industry body of the region, to urge northeastern states to raise the threshold limit to Rs 20 lakh from the present Rs 10 lakh as the "ball is now in the court of the states".

Ravi Kota, principal secretary (finance), said Assam was open to revisiting the threshold limit but not before analysing the tax implications.

"We need to wait for the GST regime to stabilise. We need to have the actual number of registered tax payers for the amount collected above the Rs 10 lakh and Rs 20 lakh slabs. This will help us analyse the ground situation and take the right call. We are still in a transition phase. It will not be prudent to take a call in haste for a consumer state like ours," he said.

Kota said Assam has over 1.2 lakh traders registered under GST, of whom around 80,000 are active.

If the exemption limit is raised to Rs 20 lakh, an estimated 20,000 traders will go out of the GST net. This will hit the direct tax collection which is around Rs 12,000 crore annually, he said. "We need to analyse how much we are losing and whether we can sustain it on our own after the Centre stops compensating the states," he said.

Tax officials said another reason for the wait-and-watch policy was the "interests" of other northeastern states which had raised the exemption limit to Rs 10 lakh from Rs 1 lakh to Rs 5 lakh. "More than Assam, it will put pressure on the other states. Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland will be left with very few GST-registered traders if the exemption limit is raised to Rs 20 lakh," an official said.

"What will be the use if we exempt them now and then bring them under the GST net after a while?" one of them asked. The northeastern states had fixed the exemption limit before the GST regime came into force on July 1.