GST Evasion: Around 47000 Entities under Tax Scanner

More than 47000 entities residing in Metropolitan city like Mumbai under the scanner of Central Goods and Service Tax (CGST) department for GST evasion. The Anti-Tax Evasion Department started scrutinizing all those entities who failed to comply with the CGST filing.

Additional Commissioner of CGST and Central Excise department Manpreet Arora reportedly said that "The department had given around 7 months for the new law to settle down and had many hand-holding programmes to create awareness. Now as it has been done, we have started taking action against evaders,"

CGST and Central Excise department has been started registering the cases against non-tax payers and the CGST Act empowers the department to arrest those tax evaders in which evasion is more than 2 crores. If the evasion is more than 5 crores then the case will be considered as non-bailable offence. Only Magistrate Court has the power of granting bail to tax evaders.

The provisions for arrests under GST Law have sufficient inbuilt safeguards to ensure that these are used only under authorisation from the Commissioner. Besides this, the GST Law also stipulates that arrests can be made only in those cases where the person is involved in offences specified for the purposes of arrest and the tax amount involved in such offence is more than the specified limit.

The Act also enables to attach the properties in case the tax payers failed to pay the taxes. Some of the tax payers in Mumbai Zone are not filed its CGST-SB returns since the GST roll out.

Recently, there were reports that the Central Goods and Services Tax had arrested the Director of a Mumbai-based Company who failed to pay GST within the prescribed time. After witnessing a huge fall in the revenue numbers post-GST rollout, the Government is now keener to curb tax evasion.