The Government of India has yet to recover Tax Arrears of Rs. 3579 crores from Service Providers. The Government is aware of instances where taxes are collected by many service providers, hoteliers, traders etc. from the customers but are not deposited in the Government’s account.
Based on specific intelligence collected, detailed investigations are carried out and the due tax amount is either recovered or quasi-judicial proceedings are initiated. The details of such losses are as below:
| Financial Year | No. of cases | Amount detected (Rs. Crores) |
| 2015-16 | 1097 | 1501.49 |
| 2016-17 | 1086 | 1311.34 |
| 2017-18 (till Feb 2018) | 743 | 766.67 |
| Total | 2926 | 3579.5 |
In order to encourage compliant behaviour under GST, the Government has undertaken a massive awareness and educational campaign by regularly issuing advertisements in the media (Print/Voice/Visual) to educate the taxpayers about GST laws and procedures. Further, CBEC has conducted various workshops and town hall meetings to educate the taxpayers in this regard. In addition to this, social media (Twitter) has also been extensively used for disseminating information regarding GST laws, rules and tax rates.
The GST Council has constituted a Committee on invoices under the chairmanship of CEO, GSTN to examine the feasibility of generating invoices on the GST portal and to suggest an incentive scheme to encourage the taxpayers to upload their tax paid invoices online.
This was stated by Shiv Pratap Shukla, Minister of State for Finance in a written reply to a question in Lok Sabha today.
