Commercial Taxes dept review finds 3K ‘non-existent’ GST taxpayers
A total of 3,147 newly-registered taxpayers under the Tamil Nadu GST Act, 2017, were found to be non-existent at the declared business premises by Commercial Taxes Department officials. Of these, 1,972 registrations have been cancelled and further action is being taken for the remaining cases. This exercise is carried out every month, according to a policy note tabled at the Assembly on Thursday.
Meanwhile, verification of e-Way bill data and detailed scrutiny of returns filed by taxpayers are being carried out to curb ‘bill trading’ activities. During the year 2021-22, a total of 1,044 bill traders had been identified and action under the TNGST Act is being taken.
Moreover, beneficiaries who have availed fake ITC (Input Tax Credit) are being identified and action is being taken by blocking wrongly-availed credit. Such amount is collected along with penalty and interest. Further, in 16 cases, provisional attachment of bank account/property of the taxable person has been ordered by the Commissioner of Commercial Taxes, the policy note said.
Meanwhile, the department will utilise the expertise of the National Informatics Centre, Bangalore — which carried out the integration of FASTag with the e-Way bill system — to curb ‘bill trading’. Suspected ‘bill traders’ will be identified by using data analytics reports of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) live data, which is available in the e-Way bill portal.
These bill traders generate e-Way bills for huge outward supplies without any actual inward supplies, the department said. In order to expand the scope of checking the movement of goods vehicles and ensure tax compliance, the total number of roving squads has been increased from 53 to 100.
No. of e-Way bills generated
(April 01, 2021 to March 31, 2022)
Inter-State movement: 2,60,79,161
Intra-State movement: 5,02,12,303
