"If elected to power, the Congress will bring reforms in Goods and Services Tax (GST)," said Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday.

Interacting with the people here, he said the Congress will reform it to bring about a single tax. It will cap rates at more manageable levels and try to remove the confusion surrounding the five-tier tax structure.

"The changes we have in mind will remove the burden on traders, especially small and medium traders and businessmen," he added.

Recalling the GST model that the UPA government had been planning, he said: "We had the idea of having one tax, putting a large number of items used by poor people outside GST. And capping the single tax at 18 per cent. That was our GST model."

"We had raised many GST-related issues in Parliament, but the NDA government was not in for seeking advice," he added. "We kept telling them not to go for a five-tier GST, but they did not listen to us."

The Congress also suggested a pilot project before implementing GST, but that was not done, he said.

Pilot run

He added that his party had told Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, "Do not put an untested system on 1.3 billion people — it will be a disaster."

"You will be surprised at the answer we got," said Rahul. "Jaitley’s response was ’Modi has decided. He is going to do it at midnight on so and so date’."

"We said, ’Please tell Modi that the systems have not been tested. The websites (GSTN) have not been tested. Please test them, run the system for three months and then apply (GST).’ They said no and the results are before us," said the leader.

The desire to "show off" had resulted in a poor GST model and implementation, he added.