When globally most of the citizens want to evade paying tax and find shortcuts to get the services, this story of two amazing Indians needs to be told. Even when they had the option to work with a vendor and avoid paying GST of ₹8,281, they chose to pay the GST because the service is managed by Better Home and are happy to pay the extra tax to our country.

My friends have been following me on LinkedIn and supporting Better Home. When they wanted to renovate their home, they called me to organise the civil works (demolishing the walls, plastering it, etc.) and the interior works (modular kitchen, etc). I organised the team for the civil works who sent the quotation directly to them.

We had to delay the work for some reasons. Recently when they decided to start, the civil works team gave a new quotation which was 10% more due to the increase in prices, which was not expected by my customers.

On top of this, I sent the quotation with my minimal service fee of ₹1,000 and 18% GST for the charges by the civil works team. It came to approximately 35% more than the first quotation. This was a shocker for my customers.

I called them and explained that the civil works team’s annual turnover is less than 20 lakhs and hence they need not collect or pay GST. They sent the quotation mistakenly to them. Better Home should have given the quotation. We collect and pay GST. So this time we sent it with the price increase, our service and GST.

Since it is a big jump in the overall cost, I offered two solutions:

1. Get the bill from the Civil Works team, which will save them ₹8,000+ in tax. I would send a separate bill of ₹1,180 (including GST) for organising the service.
2. Get the bill from Better Home, which means they have to shell out ₹8,281 in GST alone. I told them we always do the right thing and have to charge GST in our bills.

They asked for 30 minutes to decide and surprised me by choosing option 2. The reasons are:

1. They do not want to bypass Better Home. They know the civil works team only through us. They want to be ethical.
2. They are happy to pay the extra money to the government because as true citizens, they want to do the right thing for the country and follow the laws.

My respect grew for them multi-fold. I showed my respect by thanking them for their support to Better Home, appreciated their genuineness, their ethics, and also reduced our service fee to just ₹118 (including GST).

If everyone in this world were like my customers, there would be amazing transparency in the services and more money for the government to serve the people.

Please join me in wishing and thanking them for their inspirational action.

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