KARACHI - The Sindh Government has proposed that General Sales Tax (GST) on telecommunication services be given to the province, especially generated from those SIMS that are being operated in the province. This was proposed by Sindh Finance Department in its proposals presented in Sindh Assembly on Friday and has been sent to the Provincial Standing Committee on Finance for further review. Currently the GST is 16 percent on telecommunication services which is being collected by Federal Board of Revenue and in the areas where the SIM is registered irrespective of its operating areas. The proposal suggests that it is 'to provide for the levy of sales tax on services provided, initiated, consumed or received in the province of Sindh. This tax net would cover the telecommunication services that include transmission, emission, or reception of signals, writing, images, sounds, or information of any kind by wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems, including, a provision of access to a global or local information network, but does not include the supply of the underlying writing, images, sounds, or information. This extensively has come under the domain 'Supply of services in Province of Sindh and pertaining to telecommunication services it says that 'if a person initiates the services in Province of Sindh; in any other case, if the recipient is ordinarily resident in the province of Sindh. The proposal further says that the person (entity) who initiates a telecommunications services is: the person who is identified by the supplier of the services as being the person who controls the commencement of the supply, the person who pays for the services, and the person who contracts for the supply. The main focus of Sindh Government for proposing the bill is to introduce and implement a broad-based tax on sales and services to be integrated with the federal taxes, and this would be called Sindh Valued Added Tax Act 2010. The step is taken with provinces demand that has been catered in the National Finance Award (NFC) duly signed by the President Asif Zardari this month after the consensus made by the chief ministers of all four provinces.