Punjab and Haryana HC Supports Tax Penalty for Reusing GST E-way Bills

The penalty against the transporter would have been maintained by the Punjab and Haryana High Court which held that the reusing of the e-way bills shows the tax evasion intention.

The intention to evade the tax payment is an important ingredient to execute the proceedings against the individual under section 130. The transporter would be needed to reuse the GST e-way bills and the tax invoices, the aim to avoid paying taxes has been impliedly established in the records, as witnessed by the bench of Justice G.S. Sandhawalia and Justice Harpreet Kaur Jeewan.

The taxpayer would have been involved in the transportation of goods business via road. Asstt. excise and taxation officer interrupted and detained the appellant’s consignment loaded in the vehicle under section 68 (3) of the CGST Act, 2017 read with Section 68 (3) of the HGST Act, 2017, and Section 20 of the IGST Act by issuing a seizure memo.

The appellate authority said that it is an instance of document reuse with the malicious purpose to avoid paying taxes that are legitimately owed to the government. Genuine documents were not used to protect the goods.

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The appeal authority upheld the legality of the Proper Officer’s ruling while noting that “withholding the truth and tendering falsehood is as per se acts of men’s rea to evade the tax due to the State.”

The court noted that the appellate authority correctly held that it was a case of reuse of the documents when it was noticed that the quantity of scrap mentioned in the documents produced by the driver differed from the quantity of the documents that were being carried at the time of the vehicle’s interception, keeping in mind the lengthy delay between the date of issuance of the e-way bills and the date of the vehicle’s interception.

The court, the Proper Officer passed the order under Section 129 and under Section 130 of the CGST Act, 2017, read with the provision of the IGST Act, 2017, would be statutory and valid and would have been maintained via the appellate authority.