The investigation arm of the Finance Ministry has detected tax evasion of ₹29,088 crore in 1,835 cases during April-October period of the current financial year, a senior official said Wednesday.

Of this, the Directorate-General of GST Intelligence (DGGI), the enforcement agency for checking indirect tax evasion, has detected evasion of GST of ₹4,562 crore in 571 cases.

However, the bulk of the evasion was detected in case of service tax. The total number of cases where service tax was evaded stood at 1,145 involving ₹22,973 crore.

In case of central excise duty, the DGGI detected 119 cases where tax evaded was worth ₹1,553 crore.

The official further said the total amount of detection was likely to be more as the data does not include detection by field offices of the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC). On recovery of evaded taxes, the official said that a total of ₹5,427 crore was realised during the seven-month period till October. These, he added, includes recovery from previous cases and those detected during the current financial year.

The larger chunk of recovery during April-October in GST, the official said, can be attributed to the decision of the CBIC to tighten on evaders.

With a view to focus on checking evasion, the apex indirect tax body had in September set up the Office of Commissioner GST (Investigation), headed by Neeraj Prasad.

Last month, the Finance Ministry had extended the informant reward scheme of central excise and service tax to GST. The scheme was modified to include officers of other government agencies like police, BSF, CISF and coast guard.

As per the reward scheme, informers and government servants were eligible for reward up to 20 per cent of the net sale-proceeds of the contraband goods seized and/or amount of duty/ service tax evaded plus amount of penalty levied and recovered.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW