Income earned by foreign technical consultants for providing monitoring services to Indian entities will be taxed at higher rate as business profits, the Authority for Advance Ruling has said. Referring to the contract between the Australian company and GAIL, the AAR said that monitoring activities undertaken by the foreign company was not within the scope of the DTAA between Australia and India. The Australian firm was acting as a project monitoring consultant.
This order is a part of the $5,941.93 million or Rs 35,000-crore (Rs 350-billion) project, which is to be implemented in 4 years.