Atf Customer Credit Application: Fill & Download for Free

Hi. The AR15 is the most popular rifle in America and has been sold in various forms since the 1970s. It is estimated that there are over 20 million currently in civilian hands, nearly all of which are unregistered and nearly impossble to trace. Statistically, less than 10% of owners comply with laws mandating retroactive registration under threat of felony charges. Those AR15s are not going away. In addition to those 20 million AR15s, there are literally billions of 30 round magazines and trillions of rounds of ammunition. This is no exaggeration. Actually, the number is probably higher.Oh, but what about other semi-automatic rifles with detachable high-capacity magazines other than the AR15? The AK47, Mini 14, Galil, M14, M1 Carbine, High Point 995, Uzi, Thompson, FAL, ect, ad infinitum? Some of these have been around since the 1920s. Many were sold very cheaply before the Clinton import ban… remember the days of $120 M1 Carbines and $50 SKS rifles? Add at least 50 million more guns to those 20 million AR15s. And then there are “high capacity pistols” like the Glock 9mm which holds 17 rounds and can accept a 33 round mag. The Glock is super popular. There are more Glocks out there than AR15s.Even if the government were to revoke all FFLs and shut down every gun factory, you have over 100,000,000 semi-automatic weapons already out there. “OMFG! WHY HASN’T EVERYONE DIED IN THE GUNPOCOLYPSE?” Because most gun owners are responsible citizens who do not commit crimes, threaten others, or permit their guns to be misappropriated by unauthorized persons. That is what thugs, loonies, and criminally negligent persons do. Less than one thousandth of a percent of legally owned semi-automatic rifles are used in crimes. The number is infintesimally small.Gun laws are invariably dishonest, misrepresented as “reasonable common sense” measures, but the small print and multiple riders tell a very different tale altogether. Zealots like Bloomberg and Schumer realize mass confiscation is logistically impossible, and understand that criminals obtain their guns via burglary or the black market. Then there is the matter of over 100,000 firearms missing from federal armories, including thousands of submachineguns and literal pallets of explosives. And let’s not even mention the CONEX containers filled with black market full auto that regularly arrive here on Chinese frieghters which are barely glanced at by Customs… these laws will do nothing to stop criminals from obtaining guns… everyone knows that. After all, anyone with a lathe and a CNC mill can create a gun factory, it’s not that difficult with a schematic and machinist skills.Gun control laws do only two things: they criminalize gun owners over trivial bureaucratic infractions which tend to be arbitrary, vague, misapplied… and they prohibit approximately 15% of Americans from lawfully residing in the same home as a gun owner (constructive possession statutes).Did you know that Blacks, marijuana users, and political activists can be imprisoned without due process if accused of keeping an old 22 bolt action squirrel rifle in their closet? Yup, “prohibited person” status. After all, gun control was originally enacted to disarm: freed slaves, Native Americans, immigrant laborers, and dirty hippies. One in three adult Black males is disbarred the right to possess firearms due to a prior felony conviction. Statistically, most of these were relatively minor offenses, years or decades prior, likely overprosecuted due to racism and the inability to afford competent counsel… and even after paying your debt to society that subcitizen status remains, barring you from employment, housing, credit, and gun ownership. In 1986 a law was passed enabling rehabilitated or wrongfully convicted ex-offenders to appeal directly to ATF for restoration of gun rights… but in 1992 Chuck Schumer screeched it was a “loophole” intended to “give guns to felons” and slipped a rider into a federal budget bill which stripped funding from the ATF office in charge of handling clemency applications.That is what “gun control” means to me. Mewling, hand wringing, baseless accusations of hating children… all in the name of racism, oppression of political opponents, turning people against family and coworkers over false ideology. It is all based on lies. They are always dishonest and manipulative as well as hypocritical. You have heard of Bloomberg’s group “Mayors Against Illegal Guns?” You should look up “Illegal Mayors Against Guns” for a list of all the felonies these people have been charged with, many involving misuse of guns. It seems most gun control zealots are firearm owners, and many use their guns in a neglegent or malicious manner… but for some reason their crimes are always minimized, reduced, dismissed due to their wealth and connections… unlike gun owners who miss a flight at JFK and are forced to take their declared handgun to a motel… or travellers in the Northeast caught with a single 30 round magazine in a lockbox in the trunk of their car… because “how much justice can you afford?” and “just us.”C. R. Jahn, author of FTW Self Defense

It is more correctly termed the “private sale exception”.Quick(ish) background in U.S. Federal gun law (if this is nothing new to you, skip to the bold text about halfway down). Two major laws in 1968, the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act and the Gun Control Act, restricted interstate trade in firearms based on the Federal government’s Commerce Clause powers. The GCA established a licensing scheme, the Federal Firearms License, for those who made a living having to do with making, transporting or selling firearms, and the OCCSSA prohibited any interstate transfer of firearms, with the subsequent GCA re-legalizing transfers between FFL holders and additionally requiring firearms manufacturers to initially transfer their newly-manufactured guns to an FFL-licensed dealer before they can be sold at retail (different license types; a manufacturer license allows you to make but not sell and a dealer license just the opposite). It also heavily restricted imports of firearms using a “points” system specifically targeting small handguns, and, perhaps most germane to our discussion, it criminalized any sale, gift, or other permanent transfer of a firearm to anyone the transferor (seller, giver) knows or has reasonable cause to believe is a convicted felon.Now, that’s all well and good, until you try to actually enforce any of this. One of the biggest problems is that we do not tattoo “CONVICTED FELON” on the foreheads of convicted felons; something about the 8th Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, possibility of wrongful conviction and exoneration, the possibility and imperfect nature of tattoo removal, etc. Even the most advanced background check systems available to police were often not available to FFLs, and in the minority of cases where they were, they only covered that one state. It was therefore very hard for an FFL to demonstrate any due diligence in making sure their buyer wasn’t a felon, and if they did there were so many holes in the system that it was still a crap shoot whether a customer had a clean record. These laws were also ambiguous in several ways, like not defining who is “engaged in the business of firearms” and therefore needs an FFL, or what is or isn’t an “interstate transfer” of a firearm that requires an FFL to be involved in moving it; in the absence of clear definitions, the ATF got to fill in the blanks, and court challenges tended to go in predictable ways based on the ideology regarding guns in the local populace.The Firearm Owner’s Protection Act of 1986, or FOPA, is lampooned by many gun owners for its inclusion of the Hughes Amendment which bans all civilian sales of machine guns manufactured after May 1986, but if you look past that it did do a lot to actually protect gun owners. A “peaceable journey” provision made it clear that it was legal to cross state lines with a gun if you were travelling from anywhere you could lawfully possess it, to anywhere else you could lawfully possess it, and the gun was unloaded and in a locked case or separate area of the vehicle inaccessible to passengers. It also clarified that “engaged in the business of firearms” definitely does not apply to “occasional sales or trades in furtherance of a hobby or casual interest in firearms”. Still ambiguous, but easier to demonstrate that you weren’t running a gun shop out of your garage, as long as you didn’t have a sign over your garage saying “Buy/Sell/Trade Guns & Ammo”. Lastly, it contained other clarifications of terms and explicit limitations on their applicability which the ATF had been abusing to put people in prison for technical violations, like paperwork typos, not made in a malicious manner.However, the “knew or reasonably should have known the other guy was a felon” language of the GCA remained a problem both for gun dealers and the ATF. Where judges and juries leaned pro-gun, crooked FFLs walked, and where sentiment leaned anti-gun, honest business owners lost their license, their freedom and their gun rights because they sold to a guy whose rap sheet from three states over could never have been obtained by that FFL at the time, but in hindsight looks pretty obvious to a jury. The lack of a standard, nationally-available way to prove gun sellers were doing their due diligence remained a problem into the 90s.Enter the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993, aka the “Brady Bill”. Background checks became mandatory for all sales of firearms involving or mediated by an FFL, which includes all sales of newly-manufactured guns, all interstate sales, and any resales of trade-ins or consignment sales brokered by the FFL regardless of the location of the gun’s previous owner. The Brady Bill also increased the criteria that made someone a “prohibited person”, including not just felons but drug addicts, legally insane persons, those involuntarily committed to a mental institution, non-citizens (exceptions for legal permanent residents). The Lautenberg Amendment would add domestic violence offenders to the list of prohibited persons in 1996.The Brady Act required all states to make their criminal records and other records of disqualifying statuses accessible to FFLs, and originally mandated a 3-day waiting period, which would be used by the gun owner to call around to all 51 legal jurisdictions in the U.S.. The NRA said “uh-uh”, and instead negotiated for the creation of a call center run by the FBI and connected to the FBI’s “Interstate Identification Index” and “National Criminal Information Center” databases maintained at a facility in West Virginia. This new “National Instant Check System”, or NICS, gave gun dealers a tool they could use to find information from all 50 states, DC, the Federal Department of Justice and Department of Defense criminal records that indicate the person is disqualified from owning or possessing a gun, and it made that information available on a while-you-wait basis.Once this system came fully online in 1998, the 3-day wait was dropped, and instead it became a crime for FFLs not to use it; transfers without a clean NICS check, or any other proof of a clean criminal/mental background as the States may see fit to provide or require, are a felony whether the person’s clean or not. The benefit is that if an FFL uses the system, it says “proceed", and it turns out the guy is actually prohibited, the seller is legally covered (which has unfortunately happened, most notably in the case of Devin Kelley, the Sutherland Springs church shooter, who passed at least three background checks despite a court-martial conviction for domestic violence resulting in a BCD).And now, we get to your question. FFLs are required to use NICS to vet their customers. However, those not “engaged in the business of firearms”, selling just one or two from their personal collection to another person that lives in the same state they do, do not have to use this system, and in fact the NICS system cannot be accessed by anyone without an FFL.This is the “private sale loophole”; one person who doesn’t buy and sell firearms as a reliable source of income can sell a firearm to another person living in the same state who also doesn’t deal in them for a living, and while it’s still a huge no-no for both people if the “transferee” receiving the firearm is a known prohibited person, a background check is not explicitly required in this case under Federal law. Most “private sales” are face-to-face transactions with no connection to an organized gun-related event.It’s commonly called the “gun show loophole” because of the mistaken impression that gun shows work like swap meets or flea markets, where people just show up and buy/sell/trade with each other. In reality they are little more than a collection of remote locations for local gun stores, and as FFLs those booth operators must still vet every buyer when selling an actual firearm, therefore better than 95% of all sales that occur at gun shows are vetted.The criticism, of course, is that anyone denied a gun purchase from a gun store because they failed their background check can just go find someone on Craigslist that is selling a gun, show up, hand over the cash and they have a gun. The lack of vetting of private sales also further enables “straw purchases”, where people who can possess guns legally buy them, and then turn around and sell/give them to people who can’t pass a NICS check. Even if caught, the “transferor” can plausibly say they didn’t and couldn’t know the guy was bad news*. Straw buys are believed to account for about 30% of all guns used in violent crime, second only to stolen guns (most of those also suspected of being straw buys with the “theft” being legal cover), so it’s a pretty big deal.Why don’t these transactions require a background check? Good question. Reasons:The bulk of Federal gun law, other than the NFA, rests on the Federal government’s powers to regulate interstate commerce under the Commerce Clause. Several notable Supreme Court cases have increased the scope of these powers considerably**, however there are still limits. The question of Congress’s control over sales between two private citizens within one state (neither in nor affecting interstate commerce) has not been considered recently enough to take some notable Commerce Clause-related rulings like Gonzalez v. Raich into account, and it remains an open question whether intrastate private sales fall under Federal scope of authority under any combination of its enumerated powers. So far, Congress and the ATF have been unwilling to test these waters for fear of being rebuffed by SCOTUS, which would likely have broader implications on the Feds’ powers in general.More practically, as of its creation, the Internet was still relatively young, and service-based data interchange still a new concept. Now, of course, almost everything on the Internet has a service-based API, but in the mid-90s and even for a decade thereafter, the best available method for FFLs to access NICS was a call center, meaning it needs human staff taking calls, inputting information relayed verbally from the 4473 by the FFL and verbally giving the results of the check.For a “customer base” of 140,000 FFLs ranging in frequency from a couple calls a week to several a day, that’s manageable. Up until the runup to the 2008 election, new gun sales averaged about 3 million a year, which is about 8,250 calls a day, 820 an hour in a 10-hour day, each call takes about 15 minutes, so a call center pool of about 200 people can keep pace. The Feds have much larger call centers than that for the IRS, VA, USDA etc, and by the time gun purchases ramped up significantly in the Obama Administration, many FFLs had software that interfaced with “eNICS”, an online version of the NICS call-in that reduces turnaround time.For 70 million gun owners that would need to call in every time they sell, lend or gift a gun to a person not explicitly exempted by the law, a system plenty large enough for the FFL user base, even with the current electronic supplement, would quickly grind to a complete halt beginning around mid-September and continuing through January, as a combination of deer season and the holidays create a perfect storm of firearms transfers.Even with more modern communications channels allowing very high volume of requests and high rate of data transfer, in information security terms, NICS is an “oracle"; a source of information from “beyond”, useful for purposes beyond its intent including direct contravention of the very system the oracle is a part of. As just one example, all you need is a list of names, addresses, DOBs and POBs, and if you have NICS access and sufficient time/bandwidth to run them through, you now know who among those people can legally own a gun and who cannot. This circumvents the intent of the system from being used on a case by case basis for actual potential buyers, to become a means of publicly exposing people the government has some really good reason to deny buying a gun. Various media outlets have already shown themselves to be willing and able to abuse online databases in “doxxing” stories about people or issues of public interest, and guns are nothing if not an issue of public interest.Logistically, the 4473 form currently used by FFLs as proof they did their due diligence is identity theft on a silver platter. Full legal name, address, date of birth, place of birth, SSN/TIN, height, weight, gender and ethnicity; with a photo of a person roughly meeting those appearance criteria, you could take out a mortgage in that person’s name. FFLs are required by law to safeguard this information for a minimum of 20 years before it can be destroyed, the methods of safeguarding require physical and information security similar to financial and educational institutions, and they have a lot to lose if they fail in any way. Extended to private sales, you're now requiring that same level of protection of buyer information for everyone wishing to sell a firearm face-to-face, and there weren't any very good options to make that more convenient at the time the law was drafted.Enforcement of the existing law against buyers and sellers alike is really lax. In 2017, 8,606,286 NICS transactions were performed. Of those, 112,090 were denied, the most common reason being for criminal conviction, something you’re not likely to legitimately not know about. However, only 12,710 of those denials were investigated by the ATF, and just 12 were successfully prosecuted. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of Sutherland Springs, the US Armed Forces JAG divisions ran an audit of courts-martial convictions, and found over 4,000 cases with dispositions that should have been reported but weren’t. That represents more than 6 entire calendar years’ worth of all cleared courts-martial cases across all five service branches under the UCMJ. So the JAG office wasn’t just missing a few disqualifying reports making Kelley’s omission a one-off; it wasn’t even trying. Various State Departments of Justice/Corrections ran similar audits and found more reporting gaps. So, if you’ve been convicted of a disqualifying crime since NICS went online, depending on jurisdiction, the odds may well be better that you’ll pass the background check than to be prosecuted for failing it.I mentioned a few points back that some people or situations would be “exempt” from this check even if it were “universalized”. That’s because any requirement that NICS be consulted every time a firearm changes hands between any two people is ludicrously impractical. People try out other people’s guns on the range all the time; I own guns, you own guns, so we must have passed our most recent background checks and not given the police any reason to round em up since, therefore the odds are pretty damn good neither of us is a felon, crazy, wife-beater etc. Other common exemptions are transfers between immediate family (how “immediate” depends on the exact law; spouses and children of the owner are generally gimmes, but I’ve seen state UBC laws where grandfather-grandchild is OK but uncle-nephew is not), between holders of state CCWs (the permit, especially the fact you still have it in your possession, is pretty solid proof in most states that you’re not even suspected of a potentially-disqualifying crime), at any time while under the owner’s direct supervision, and a few others that generally have too low a chance for abuse to justify how often a check would be needed if required. So, even “universal” background checks wouldn’t be.So, while we have the technology now to vet people from pretty much anywhere we have cell signal, and to provide mathematically provable authentic records of sale, these are developments that entered widespread use long after the Brady Bill was drafted.Since that time, those advocating for increased gun control tipped their hand to gun rights advocates a few times too many, primarily with the Federal Assault Weapons Ban which passed a year after the Brady Bill. The debate over the AWB, and at other times during the Clinton Administration, gave gun rights advocates some doozies in the quote department from gun control supporters, which give the lie in gun owners’ eyes to pretty much any statement made since that attempts to be any less extreme in goals or that describe proposals as “reasonable” or “common sense”. When gun owners have documented attributable quotes straight out of the mouths of sitting Congresspersons that they would pass broad outright bans if they could, that it’s not about crime, and that the master plan is a step-by-step increase in restrictions to get to a point where most or all guns are banned, it’s really hard to get gun owners to the table to talk about “this little piece of the puzzle that’s totally reasonable and common sense”.So, as a result, gun owners, and the representatives in Congress who know these people tend to be pretty motivated voters***, are fairly unilaterally opposed to any further gun control, including expansion of NICS and other background checks. Some, like myself, are willing to negotiate on a quid pro quo basis within the topic of gun laws; we might trade an agreeable implementation of universal background checks**** for, say, national reciprocity and deregulation of certain NFA categories like suppressors. Others, more hard-line, “want their damn cake back - all of it”.These sentiments have stymied pretty much any effort by gun control advocates to get anything new passed at the Federal level since the AWB expired in 2004, including any reform of background check requirements. The only thing that comes to mind that’s had enough support from gun owners to get through Congress is the Fix NICS Act, passed back in March 2018 in the wake of Sutherland Springs, which imposes actual penalties on State and Federal agencies and their management when NICS records for which they’re responsible are found to be out of date, incomplete or wrong. That Act’s primary opposition came from Senate Democrats including Dianne Feinstein, who threatened to kill it if it went to the floor coupled with an act forcing national reciprocity of concealed carry permits (which was the two-bill package deal that passed the House).Can we get there? Probably. But there are hurdles to overcome on both sides; skepticism from gun owners that gun control advocates won’t see an inch given and try to take a mile, and a lack of sympathy towards gun owners from gun control advocates who do not own guns and likely never will, and therefore will never have to jump through any existing hoops to say nothing of new ones. Really, I think the ball’s in the gun control advocates’ court; at a high level, the onus is on them to break the impasse by making some overt, material effort to convince gun owners that preserving gun owners’ rights under the Second Amendment is a priority and not just lip service to flip a couple moderate votes for another restriction. We definitely are not there yet.* IMHO, the primary difficulty in combating straw purchases is that it’s not a crime to have your property stolen. So, anyone suspected of a straw buy just has to say they bought it and then had it stolen by their live-in boyfriend who has dropped off the face of the earth, and of course they had no idea he was a member of the South Side Crips, and the prosecutor has to be able to conclusively disprove one of those two things to overcome reasonable doubt.** Wickard v. Filburn, decided in 1942, held that the Commerce Clause applied to actions affecting interstate commerce as well as those actually involving interstate commerce. Scarborough v. U.S. in 1977, held that regulation of things in or affecting interstate commerce does not have to be closely related in time or scope to the situation in which the article entered or affected commerce; the Feds have authority to regulate anything that has ever crossed state lines for business purposes from that moment until the thing ceases to exist as such. U.S. v. Lopez in 1995 further codified the ways in which an activity can fall under Commerce Clause powers in a three-prong test; if a law regulates or restricts something that actually moves or has moved across state lines, is of a kind that moves across state lines, or significantly affects interstate commerce while not moving in it itself, it’s a valid use of Commerce Clause powers. Gonzales v. Raich in 2005 then held that not only can the Feds use Commerce Clause powers to regulate what does move, has moved or in any way affects interstate commerce, it can also use the Necessary and Proper Clause in combination with the Commerce Clause to regulate things in situations where none of the first three apply, when and to the degree it is “necessary and proper” to do so in the course of enforcing the law in other situations definitely falling into one of those categories.*** The passage of the Brady Act and AWB are generally considered major factors in the GOP winning a bicameral Congressional majority in 1996 for the first time in 40 years, and the first sustained majority since the New Deal. It put legislators on notice that gun owners had more political clout than anyone was willing to admit at the time, and accompanied a “red wave” at the state level which among other things resulted in significant relaxation of ownership and carry laws in most states outside New England and California.**** What’s “agreeable” depends on whom you ask, but a good start is no centralized repository of records (under FOPA, neither State nor Federal governments can be the custodian of persistent records of firearm purchase or ownership because that is a “registry”, though State governments have given FOPA the middle finger pretty much since it was passed), no major long-term identity theft risks from the paperwork involved (name, address and DL# as of the time of sale would be enough for the police to find the next link in the chain, not enough to open a credit card), and not requiring every sale to be FFL-mediated (which would hopelessly clog gun stores with transfer mediation requests, and is a de facto ban on private sales as the FFL might as well be handling a consignment sale).

The significant features of GST are as under:(i) GST would be applicable on “supply” of goods or services as against the present concept of tax on the manufacture of goods or on sale of goods or on provision of services.(ii) GST would be based on the principle of destination based consumption taxation as against the present principle of origin based taxation.(iii) It would be a dual GST with the Center and the States simultaneously levying it on a common base. The GST to be levied by the Center would be called Central GST (CGST) and that to be levied by the States [including Union territories with legislature] would be called State GST (SGST). Union territories without legislature would levy Union territory GST (UTGST).(iv) An Integrated GST (IGST) would be levied on inter-State supply (including stock transfers) of goods or services. This would be collected by the Center so that the credit chain is not disrupted.(v) Import of goods would be treated as inter-State supplies and would be subject to IGST in addition to the applicable custom duties.(vi) Import of services would be treated as inter-State supplies and would be subject to IGST.(vii) CGST, SGST /UTGST& IGST would be levied at rates to be mutually agreed upon by the Centre and the States under the aegis of the GSTC.(viii) GST would replace the following taxes currently levied and collected by the Center: a) Central Excise Duty;b) Duties of Excise (Medicinal and Toilet Preparations);c) Additional Duties of Excise (Goods of Special Importance);d) Additional Duties of Excise (Textiles and Textile Products);e) Additional Duties of Customs (commonly known as CVD);f) Special Additional Duty of Customs (SAD);g) Service Tax;h) Cesses and surcharges insofar as they relate to supply of goods or services.(ix) State taxes that would be subsumed within the GST are: a) State VAT;b) Central Sales Tax;c) Purchase Tax;d) Luxury Tax;e) Entry Tax (All forms);f) Entertainment Tax (except those levied by the local bodies);g) Taxes on advertisements;h) Taxes on lotteries, betting and gambling;i) State cesses and surcharges insofar as they relate to supply of goods or services.(x) GST would apply to all goods and services except Alcohol for human consumption.(xi) GST on five specified petroleum products (Crude, Petrol, Diesel, ATF & Natural gas) would be applicable from a date to be recommended by the GSTC.(xii) Tobacco and tobacco products would be subject to GST. In addition, the Centre would continue to levy Central Excise duty.(xiii) A common threshold exemption would apply to both CGST and SGST. Taxpayers with an annual turnover of Rs. 20 lac (Rs. 10 lac for special category States as specified in article 279A of the Constitution) would be exempt from GST. A compounding option (i.e. to pay tax at a flat rate without credits) would be available to small taxpayers (including to specified category of manufacturers and service providers) having an annual turnover of up to Rs. 50 lac. The threshold exemption and compounding scheme would be optional.(xiv) The list of exempted goods and services would be kept to a minimum and it would be harmonized for the Centre and the States as well as across States as far as possible.(xv) Exports would be zero-rated.(xvi) Credit of CGST paid on inputs may be used only for paying CGST on the output and the credit of SGST/UTGST paid on inputs may be used only for paying SGST/UTGST. In other words, the two streams of input tax credit (ITC) cannot be cross utilized, except in specified circumstances of inter-State supplies for payment of IGST. The credit would be permitted to be utilized in the following manner: a) ITC of CGST allowed for payment of CGST & IGST in that order;b) ITC of SGST allowed for payment of SGST & IGST in that order;c) ITC of UTGST allowed for payment of UTGST & IGST in that order;d) ITC of IGST allowed for payment of IGST, CGST & SGST/UTGST in that order.ITC of CGST cannot be used for payment of SGST/UTGST and vice versa.(xvii) Accounts would be settled periodically between the Centre and the State to ensure that the credit of SGST used for payment of IGST is transferred by the originating State to the Centre. Similarly the IGST used for payment of SGST would be transferred by Centre to the Destination State. Further the SGST portion of IGST collected on B2C supplies would also be transferred by Centre to the Destination State. The transfer of funds would be carried out on the basis of information contained in the returns filed by the taxpayers.(xviii) Input Tax Credit (ITC) to be broad based by making it available in respect of taxes paid on any supply of goods or services or both used or intended to be used in the course or furtherance of business.(xix) Electronic filing of returns by different class of persons at different cut-off dates.(xx) Various modes of payment of tax available to the taxpayer including internet banking, debit/ credit card and National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT) / Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS).(xxi) Obligation on certain persons including government departments, local authorities and government agencies, who are recipients of supply, todeduct tax at the rate of 1% from the payment made or credited to the supplier where total value of supply, under a contract, exceeds two lakhs and fifty thousand rupees (Rs. 2.5 lac).(xxii) Refund of tax to be sought by taxpayer or by any other person who has borne the incidence of tax within two years from the relevant date.(xxiii) Obligation on electronic commerce operators to collect ‘tax at source’, at such rate not exceeding one per cent. (1%) of net value of taxable supplies, out of payments to suppliers supplying goods or services through their portals.(xxiv) System of self-assessment of the taxes payable by the registered person.(xxv) Audit of registered persons to be conducted in order to verify compliance with the provisions of Act.(xxvi) Limitation period for raising demand is three (3) years from the due date of filing of annual return or from the date of erroneous refund for raising demand for short-payment or non-payment of tax or erroneous refund and its adjudication in normal cases.(xxvii) Limitation period for raising demand is five (5) years from the due date of filing of annual return or from the date of erroneous refund for raising demand for short-payment or non-payment of tax or erroneous refund and its adjudication in case of fraud, suppression or wilful misstatement.(xxviii) Arrears of tax to be recovered using various modes including detaining and sale of goods, movable and immovable property of defaulting taxable person.(xxix) Officers would have restrictive powers of inspection, search, seizure and arrest.(xxx) Goods and Services Tax Appellate Tribunal would be constituted by the Central Government for hearing appeals against the orders passed by the Appellate Authority or the Provisional Authority. States would adopt the provisions relating to Tribunal in respective SGST Act.(xxxi) Provision for penalties for contravention of the provision of the proposed legislation has been made.(xxxii) Advance Ruling Authority would be constituted by States in order to enable the taxpayer to seek a binding clarity on taxation matters from the department. Centre would adopt such authority under CGST Act.(xxxiii) An anti-profiteering clause has been provided in order to ensure that business passes on the benefit of reduced tax incidence on goods or services or both to the consumers.(xxxiv)Elaborate transitional provisions have been provided for smooth transition of existing taxpayers to GST regime.