Central Tax Officers Issue 33,000 Notices to Businesses for GST Discrepancies

NEW DELHI: Central tax officers have sent around 33,000 notices to business houses for discrepancies in returns filed on goods and services tax (GST) and short payment of taxes in 2017-18 and 2018-19 financial years. The bunching up of demand notices was also on account of extension in the deadline given to taxpayers for filing annual returns for the two years, a top official in the tax department said on Wednesday.

Speaking at the Assocham National Conference on GST, Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) Member-GST Shashank Priya said that the central GST officers have sent around 30,000-33,000 notices to GST registered businesses for short-payment of taxes and the notices sent for 2017-18 and 2018-19 were a ‘small percentage’ of the total returns filed for the two fiscal years.

“The National Co-ordination Committee of the State and Central GST officers, chaired by the Revenue Secretary, is likely to be held by the end of this month or early January, which among other things would also sensitise tax officers regarding issuance of notices,” the official said.

As per the GST law, every registered person is liable to file annual return for every financial year on or before December 31 of the next financial year. Accordingly, the last date of filing 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,” Priya said.

“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. 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,” he said.

“I'm sure we will take up this issue in the National Coordination Committee meeting so that all tax administrations are sensitised. The disputes, if they are resolved at the level of adjudicating authority, instead of approaching the GST appellate tribunal, will be a relief both for the tax administration as well as taxpayers. We are working on an automated scrutiny module that would give certainty on how scrutiny is to be done and what kind of issues will be looked into in return scrutiny,” Priya added.

Further, the official said the GST appellate tribunal would be put in place in the next 4-5 months and efforts are also being made to identify infrastructure, following which selection process of members will start. With regard to curbing fake registration under GST, Priya also said in many tax administrations, about 25-28 per cent of the businesses registered were found to be fake. “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 added.