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An Exploratory Study of Goods and Services Tax
Awareness in Malaysia
K. Saira, M. A. Zariyawati & L. Yoke-May
Abstract
Tax has been recognized as one of the main sources of governments’ income.
Goods and Services Tax (GST) is an example of tax that contributes to the governments’ income. is tax has been implemented in many countries such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand. GST is a tax imposed on the sale of goods and services. In recent years, this issue on GST has been raised by the Malaysian Government as an approach to reduce its defi cit.
However, the Malaysian Government is still fi nding the right time to implement GST as they are still conducting studies on the social impact of
GST. is study attempts to investigate Malaysian awareness towards the upcoming of GST implementation.
Keywords: Goods and Services Tax (GST), Awareness, Malaysia.
INTRODUCTION
Fiscal policies are being adopted by governments across the world in order to infl uence their country’s economic condition. ! e government has a choice of either to use expenditure or revenue collection in implementing these policies. ! e purpose of this implementation is to solve the economic problem (infl ation or employment), thus, increasing the country’s economic growth.
Seminar on National Resilience
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Tax is a major contribution of government’s revenue collection in any countries, including Malaysia. In year 2008, statistics from the Ministry of Finance reveals that 66.7 percent of Malaysian government revenues were generated from taxes. Taxation in Malaysia is imposed by the federal legislation, passed by the Parliament. Since the introduction of tax legislation in Malaysia, there were numbers of changes made to this legislation. For example, changes in year assessment, implementation of e-fi ling, several changes in income tax rate and the latest changes was government’s intention to implement Goods and
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