Elected as the new president of PCAIT, what are your chief priorities for 2013-14?
PCAIT has been around for six years. After a long gap, a new team has taken over the reins of this Delhi-based IT association. As its current president, I have not yet set out a year-long roadmap. What we have instead is a short-term plan for one month where the effort is to resolve current issues and help our members face up to the challenges rising out of bureaucratic harassment. The tax officials are conducting arbitrary raids on our members premises leading to unnecessary complications in their day-to-day business decisions and activities. We want to send a strong message to the administration that our businesses are run on high ethical standards and we won’t tolerate this harassment.
Towards this end, we’ve already met the Commission of Delhi’s Department of Value-Added Tax (VAT) and represented our concerns to them. We made the point that our members run their businesses in a highly ethical fashion and we found that most issues related to the department emanated from issues like clerical errors and similar small matters. We made it clear that while the PCAIT will work with the government to ensure sound business, we would not tolerate any harassment from its departments in such matters.
In its six years of existence, the association has 106 members. Any plans to reach out to a wider ecosystem of partner organizations across India?
At PCAIT, our motto is to “Work Together, Build Together, Progress Together”. Hence, we will always look out to collaborate with other associations as through such an approach our ability to lobby with the government on issues related to taxes would become stronger. Our team is currently interfacing with eight to ten associations over the next 30 days.
“At present, we have 106 members contributing nearly 70 percent of the sales tax receivables by the local government. Having said that, I would like to grow the membership to 600 and more through the inclusion of large and mid-sized IT companies, be it national or sub-distributors, dealers, retailers and IT vendors. Anyone into IT business and is ethical in business, will be accepted into our fold as our broad objective is to make PCAIT a truly umbrella organization,” he said.
What is the core strength of PCAIT and what should IT channel expect from it?
The core strength of our association comes from the four Core Committees – one each on arbitration, government interface, vendor relationship and association outreach. Each of these bodies have been provided short-term goals. In addition, our immediate past president has taken over as Chairman of the organization and will provide advisory support. Given that we propose to increase membership, PCAIT is in the process of uploading comprehensive profiles of each member on our website in a bid to drive collaboration and building of domain expertise.
Lastly, in challenging times, how are you making your members maintain profitable business?
Indeed, today’s market and economic scenario is very challenging for each individual partner. We are telling our members to focus on maintaining bottomlines, and reiterating that there is no shortcut to ethical business. I think that whether we sell or distribute products, care must be taken not to build up inventory as there are only limited number of suppliers and buyers in the market today. Some of our members are unaware of the credentials of buyers and suppliers and we are committed to provide any information that we have to them. We also encourage our members to limit trading within the family to avoid default-related cases. Additionally, we also help members liquidate dead stock.