As per the reports, it was found that GST evasion is doubled in the first five months of FY 2018 than the previous year. After going slow during the transition to the GST, tax officer restarted surveying.
In the last fiscal year (2017), GST has attracted all the focus on preparation and stability, a senior official on the condition of anonymity said.
Indirect tax evasion worth Rs 18,656 crore was detected by the Directorate General of GST Intelligence in April-August 2018 as compared with Rs 7,031 crore in the previous year period.
The official cited earlier said that the process of tax detection is going on, but in last fiscal year, the tax authority could not detect the indirect tax as the department transferred to the GST and the efforts were made to strengthen the new process.
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Krishan Arora, a GST partner at Grant Thornton India LLP, agreed to it. Before GST implementation in 2017, the service tax audits started by the tax authorities couldn’t be completed, as the department’s focus was to introduce the indirect tax reign, he said. According to Arora, these audits restarted the GST reign was settled and the high detection in service tax was due to the conclusion of these audits in 2018.
“Parallelly, tax authorities initiated many new audits in the last financial year to check GST evasion as well, which could have resulted in the significant rise in the overall number,” Arora said.
As per the documents, as on September 14, 2018, total GST detected by the Directorate stood at Rs 21,869 crore. Around Rs. 3,000 crore of that was assigned to GST cases. The numbers were not available in the previous year.
As per the documents, for the entire fiscal year (2017-2018), the tax authority detected GST of Rs 25,677 crore compared with Rs 15,048 crore in 2016-17.
Tax Recoveries Jump
As per the reports, the recoveries from these evading GST in India has jumped over five times to Rs 4,015 crore in April-September 2018, as compared with approx. Rs 700 crore in the corresponding period the previous year. Recovery figures for the years ended March 2018 and March 2017 were not available.
“With the introduction of e-way bills and concerted efforts by the government in data analytics, more cases of GST evasion are getting detected and corresponding recoveries are also going up,” said an indirect tax partner at EY India.
