new delhi the prospects of an april rollout of the goods and services tax brightened on friday with the centre and the states agreeing to a compromise formula on two of the three contentious issues and also deciding to subsume all cesses into the levyall cesses which are being levied now such as swacch bharat krishi kalyan and others will be included under gst to avoid any multiplicity of taxes once the indirect tax reform measure rolls outon the other issues the gst council decided to fix a turnover threshold of rs 10 lakh for an entity to be part of the gst net in hilly and northeastern states for other states the floor has been fixed at rs 20 lakh finance minister arun jaitley announced after the end of the twoday meeting of the gst council by the end of the month the council hopes to tackle the issue of exemptions and the draft rules with a discussion on gst rates scheduled for october 1719 all eyes are now on the rates as the impact on sectors would be known once the rates are finalized all decisions today by the gst council were taken on the basis of consensus jaitley told reporters the move to have two cutoffs may be cumbersome for entities operating in multiple states but helps those states that come on board such as uttar pradesh tamil nadu and the hilly and north eastern states they were of the view that the proposed rs 25 lakh threshold would result in the exclusion of several units causing revenue losssimilarly the finance ministers opted to keep units with a turnover of up to rs 15 crore within exclusive jurisdiction of the states addressing concerns of those such as west bengal but to tackle the centres concerns the gst council agreed that service tax payers with turnover of rs 10 lakh to rs 15 crore would be handled by the centre the finance ministry had argued for dual control over units on the grounds that 93 of the assessees in the lower turnover segment were service tax payers and states had virtually no experience in this segmenton the third issue of working out a compensation formula the state finance ministers agreed to discuss the issue further while the base year will be 201516 finance minister arun jaitley told reporters that three options are being explored one option is to assume a fixed rate of revenue growth the second is to use the average for the three best years out of the past five while a third option is to exclude the two best years during the last five and then calculate the average growth this will then be used as the benchmark to calculate compensation based on the actual collection data for the financial year entities will have to handle the fact that there will be different threshold in different states it may not be ideal but you have it under vat said harishanker subramaniam indirect tax leader at