Foreword

India has seen a lot of changes in the last three years. The focus being on growth, governance and ease of doing business. The thought process being, Minimum Government, Maximum Governance. The impact of changes on the governance front are extremely positive. The sum of all the growth measures, albeit slow, is taking the economy on the right trajectory. One is not sure about the ease of doing business efforts. The intent seems to be genuine but the outcome is apparently contrary. Take the plethora of new laws and additional compliance in the past couple of years; Ind-AS, IFCR, POEM, GAAR, Bankruptcy, RERA and now GST. All these maybe justified and will keep our members busy, but they have added to the woes of the business community. The time, effort and cost of compliance has gone up significantly. One can just hope that these measures are needed for calibration to do business in a new and better way, to remove inefficiencies and parallel economy, making India a far more organised and compliant nation. And that in times to come the principle of simplicity will kick in.

Your BCA Referencer too has been gradually changing to be ahead of the changing times and way of working of financial professionals. While the PM is rightly thinking of aligning the financial year with the calendar year, BCAS has already refined its diary and made it in sync with the Calendar Year. The Referencer too has been advanced keeping in line with the advancement of the Budget this year. You will notice major changes in the presentation this year . The already easy-to-use Referencer has been made even more simpler. Text has been converted into tables and charts wherever possible. Language has been made simpler. We hope you enjoy using this year's Referencer.

A separate supplement of GST shall be made available to the subscribers of the Referencer as soon as the final law gets enacted.

All this has been made possible due to the efforts of our dedicated and committed team. This year a lot of younger CAs have been added to the already illustrious list of our compliers and they have brought a much needed freshness to the Referencer. We laud the efforts of all the compilers who bring their expertise to the table and keep this Referencer updated. We thank our Editorial team of Rajeev Shah, Yatin Desai, Sangeeta Pandit and Kinjal Bhuta for their yeomen service. The effort put in by meticulously editing such a large publication in such a short period of time and ensuring the highest quality is commendable. Our printer Finesse Graphics continues to excel in designing and printing year after year. The BCAS staff too has put in lot of effort in providing logistics and administrative support to this project.

Last, but not the least, a very big thank you to the one person who has singularly provided the vision, guidance, leadership to the team and put in painstaking effort year after year, our affable and visionary Past President Mr. Pranay Marfatia.