What is National Anti-Profiteering Authority (NAA)?

The 35th meeting of the GST Council Friday extended the tenure of  National Anti-Profiteering Authority (NAA) by two years. The NAA is an institutional mechanism under the GST law to check the unfair profit-making activities by the trading community. The official website of NAA says, "The Authority’s core function is to ensure that the benefits of the reduction is GST rates on goods and services made by GST Council and proportional change in the Input tax credit passed on to the ultimate consumers and recipient respectively by way of reduction in the prices by the suppliers."

The NAA was formed in the wake of rate-reduction of large number of items by GST Council in its 23rd meeting at Guwahati. At the meeting, the Council had reduced rates of more than 200 items including goods and services. The council had them pruned the list of 28% GST rated goods substantially, from 224 tariff headings [about 18.5% of total tariff headings at 4-digit] to only 50 tariff headings including four headings which were reduced to 18% [about 4% of total tariff headings at 4-digit]. This resulted in tremendous price reduction effect and the consumers would have benefited only if the traders were quick in reducing prices of respective items. NAA was formed to ensure this. 

Function

The main function of NAA is to ensure that traders do not realize unfair profit by charging high price from consumers in the name of GST. "The responsibility of NAA is to examine and check such profiteering activities and recommend punitive actions including cancellation of Registration. The chairman, NAA along with 4 Technical members and with help of the Standing Committee, Screening Committee in every state and the Directorate General of Safeguards in the Central Board of Excise & Customs (CBEC), will work together on the anti-profiteering front," says the NAA website. 

"We hope to bring transparency in our decisions and be more proactive in persuading the industry and traders in passing on benefits to the consumers," it adds.