Central tax officers have despatched round 33,000 GST notices to companies for discrepancies in returns filed and brief fee of taxes in 2017-18 and 2018-19 monetary years, a CBIC official mentioned on Wednesday.
The National Co-ordination Committee of the State and Central GST officers, chaired by the Revenue Secretary, is prone to be held by the top of this month or early January, which amongst different issues would additionally sensitise tax officers concerning issuance of notices, the official mentioned.
Speaking on the Assocham National Conference on GST, Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) Member-GST Shashank Priya mentioned the notices despatched for 2017-18 and 2018-19 have been a “small percentage” of the full returns filed for the 2 fiscal years.
He mentioned the bunching up of demand notices was additionally on account of extension within the deadline given to taxpayers for submitting annual returns for the 2 years. Goods and Services Tax (GST) was rolled out on July 1, 2017.
The final date for submitting annual returns for 2017-18 fiscal was prolonged until February 7, 2020, whereas for 2018-19 it was until December 2020.
Under the GST legislation, each registered particular person is liable to file annual return for each monetary 12 months on or earlier than December 31 of the following monetary 12 months. Accordingly, the final date of submitting annual return for 2022-23 fiscal is December 31, 2023.
“At the request of the taxpayers the time for return filing was postponed. So returns also were filed at a late juncture and officers have come under a lot of pressure (to scrutinise the returns). So this has led to this unfortunate situation. One hopes that as we progress forward this situation gets addressed and we will not have all the proposed notices pending at the same time. For 2017-18, it has happened like that and we will see how best to deal with it,” Priya mentioned.
The Central GST officers have despatched round 30,000-33,000 notices to GST registered companies for brief-fee of taxes, he mentioned.
“In our interaction with the field formations, we will try to sensitise them that they should put their officers on alert, they should do a critical scrutiny of details, documents, facts given by the registrants before coming to a conclusion and passing an order. I’m sure, we will take up this issue in the National Coordination Committee meeting so that all tax administrations are sensitised,” Priya mentioned.
These disputes, he mentioned, if are resolved out on the stage of adjudicating authority, as a substitute of approaching the GST appellate tribunal, could be a aid each for the tax administration in addition to taxpayers.
“We are working on automated scrutiny module that would give certainty on how scrutiny is to be done and what kind of issues will be looked into return scrutiny,” Priya mentioned.
Further, the officer mentioned the GST appellate tribunal could be put in place within the subsequent 4-5 months and efforts are additionally being made to determine infrastructure, following which choice technique of members will begin.
With regard to curbing pretend registration below GST, Priya mentioned in lots of tax administration, about 25-28 per cent of the companies registered have been discovered to be pretend.
“We are looking at how we further tighten the registration. We are also looking at how we make it less and less open for changing the GSTR-3B (monthly GST payment form),” he mentioned.
The Central and State GST officers have detected 21,791 pretend GST registrations and over Rs 24,000 crore of suspected tax evasion throughout a two-month-lengthy particular drive from May 16 to July 15, 2023, to weed out bogus registrations.
“A total of 21,791 entities (11,392 entities pertaining to state tax jurisdiction and 10,399 entities pertaining to CBIC jurisdiction) having GST registration were discovered to be non-existent. An amount of Rs 24,010 crore (state – Rs 8,805 crore + Centre – Rs 15,205 crore) of suspected tax evasion was detected during the special drive,” Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had knowledgeable the Parliament.
The National Co-ordination Committee of the State and Central GST officers in its final assembly on April 24, 2023, had determined to launch the particular drive to detect suspicious/ pretend GSTINs and to conduct requisite verification and additional remedial motion to weed out these pretend billers from the GST eco-system and to safeguard authorities income.
(This story has not been edited by News18 workers and is revealed from a syndicated information company feed – PTI)
