GST on medical services · Drug pricing · Trust audits
Healthcare and pharma businesses sit at the intersection of tax, regulatory and — for many providers — charitable-trust compliance, and we work across all three. Our GST advisory for this sector focuses specifically on the boundary between GST-exempt health services and taxable supplies, a distinction that varies by service type and is a frequent source of dispute — diagnostic and clinical care is typically exempt, while pharmacy sales, room rent above the notified threshold and cosmetic or elective procedures usually are not. For pharma manufacturers and distributors, our drug pricing compliance under NPPA guidelines work keeps ceiling-price and MRP decisions aligned with regulatory requirements before they reach the market.
Many healthcare providers operate as trusts or charitable institutions, and our hospital trust and charitable institution audit practice, alongside tax exemption registration and compliance under 12A/80G of the Income Tax Act, supports that structure specifically — including the periodic renewal cycle both registrations now sit under, and the audit trail needed to keep exemption intact when a trust also runs commercial-rate services alongside subsidised care. For pharma multinationals, our transfer pricing work handles the intercompany arrangements common across pharma group structures, from contract manufacturing to royalty and technical-fee payments to the parent.
Day to day, this plays out as inventory and batch-level accounting for pharmacies and distributors, TDS compliance on consultant-doctor payments (a frequent area of ambiguity between salary and professional-fee treatment), and import compliance for API and formulation imports where customs valuation and GST intersect. We work directly with hospital finance teams and pharma promoters rather than through a generic engagement template, because the right structure for a 40-bed trust hospital and a contract pharma manufacturer look nothing alike.