(FE)
The government said that it has detected over 1,200 cases of tax evasion in the goods and services tax (GST) regime, which amount to nearly Rs 3,000 crore. These cases belong to the July 2017-June 2018 period. “Nature of cases include misuse of input tax credit, mis-declaration in the GST returns, tax declared in GST returns and not paid, and cases where GST returns not filed and tax not paid,” the finance ministry said in response to a question in Rajya Sabha.
Additionally, the government has found five cases of evasion where undeserved input tax credit was claimed by assessees on the basis of fake invoices, resulting in evasion of Rs 23 crore. Although the IT system for GST was designed to curb acts of tax evasions, many of the anti-evasion provisions like invoice matching, reverse charge mechanism and tax collected/deducted at source have been kept in abeyance due to compliance burden on smaller taxpayers.
