The Investigation Wing working under the Ministry of Finance has detected a scam of Rs 29,088 crores in 1,835 tax cases in this financial year from April to October 2018, a senior official said Wednesday.
Out of this, GST evasion of Rs 4,562 crore has been detected by the Directorate General of GST Intelligence (DGGI) in 571 cases.
Service tax evasion is leading the list Rs 22,973 crore evasion in 1,145 cases.
In the case of central excise duty, the DGGI detected 119 cases where tax evaded was worth Rs 1,553 crore. “DGGI officers have detected total indirect tax evasion of Rs 29,088 crores during April-October,” the official told PTI.
He further said that 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 amount of Rs 5,427 crore was realized during the seven-month period till October.
The amount 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.
The Finance Ministry had also extended the informant reward scheme under the indirect tax regime 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 the amount of penalty levied and recovered.
