The Goods and Services Tax department has uncovered a scam of Rs 230 crore in Tamil Nadu. This fraudulent game was reaped by Salem-based steel dealer Mahendra Kumar Singhi and wife Suman, owners of Steel Hypermart India Pvt Ltd, and chartered accountant Mukesh Surana,.who is also the culprit under this act.
GST department will register a grievance with the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) against Surana, suspected to be the mastermind in the bluff. Surana helped them assert a huge amount of money in crores as an input tax credit by presenting bogus invoices of steel trading in the name of five companies.
This seems to be the biggest GST evasion scam. The state department is excavating the issue deeper and has bolted the homes of accused in, Bengaluru, Salem and Hosur.
“Around Pongal, we found that the invoices of some companies were suspicious and searched their offices and residences of their promoters in Salem and Bengaluru. The searches revealed that a CA was the mastermind behind the fraud. It was going on since 2017 when the GST was rolled out,” a senior officer of Commercial Tax said.
“The Singhis obtained anticipatory bail, fearing arrest. We will take action against the accused as per the GST Act,” he added
Till date, the GST software is not confirming the equivalent values and sale and this bug in GST software is to be the reason behind springing out this fraud practices.
“The Statistical Analysis Software helps us analyze the returns and throw up suspicious entries. All assessing officers have been instructed to use this software to detect suspicious returns,” he said. The Statistical Analysis Software is a software advanced by the Commercial Taxes Department to evaluate and ascertain the returns and to investigate the suspicious entries at first foot.
