AN INSIGHT INTO AWARENESS AND PERCEPTION OF CONSUMERS ABOUT GOODS AND SERVICES TAX WITH REFERENCE TO KERALA STATE.

GST (Goods and Services Tax) was introduced in India with the main goal of easing the burden on all economic stakeholders. Since they pay taxes indirectly and contribute to the government coffers, consumers are key GST stakeholders. Before the establishment of the GST, there were numerous taxes in place, which made charging taxpayers more difficult and created an issue of cascading taxes. The GST was introduced in an effort to address the shortcomings of prior tax systems and give consumers several advantages. The paper examines consumers perception, level of awareness, and satisfaction about GST. To achieve the objectives of the study online survey has been undertaken by randomly sharing survey links to consumers of three districts of Kerala state. Non-parametric test has been used to analyze the primary data collected. The Chi-square test has been used to test consumers perception, and Mann witney U test and Kruskal-Wallis tests have been used to test the significance of two or more samples. Correlation has been used to examine correlation between demographic variables and level of awareness.