Revenue secy to hold meeting with officials on GST system streamlining, plugging leakages on Jan 7

Revenue Secretary Ajay Bhushan Pandey will hold a day-long meeting on January 7 with tax commissioners to discuss ways for streamlining the GST system and plugging leakages due to fraud.

Besides, sources said, this meeting with Commissioners of State Tax and Chief Commissioners of Central Tax will also deliberate on enhancing GST compliance by plugging loopholes and discourage tax evaders, those gaming or misusing the system.

The meeting assumes significance as the GST Council in its last meeting held on December 18 wanted a detailed study on these issues before taking any call on rate hike on items.

Meanwhile, in an encouraging sign, the GST collection for December came in at around Rs 1.03 lakh crore. This was the second month in a row when the GST mop-up was over Rs 1 lakh crore.

Sources said, this multi-faceted brainstorming meeting is being organised with the purpose of curbing fraud and evasion, checking fake or huge input tax credit claims, seeking bank account details of businesses to tally with their filings, misuse of refund and sharing best practices in revenue augmentation.

Discussions in the meeting would focus on the road ahead with e-invoicing, new return system and feedback, e-way bill linking with Fastag, pendency of refunds, linkage of Aadhaar to GST registration, enforcement module use without overreach and the QR code, sources said.

A detailed review of further use of data analytics and artificial intelligence in the process of enforcement and red-flagging the tax evaders and fake refund claimants would also be taken up to augment revenue and better compliance without overreach, sources said.

It would also examine the processes designed to give due role to the collating and combined study of data from the third parties like banks/IFU-India, sources said.

This meeting would be attended by the senior officers of Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs, Central Board of Direct Taxes, Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), Directorate General of Analytics and Risk Management and GSTN officials.

Targeted approach to stop tax evasion without any overreach or harassment to the genuine taxpayers will be deliberated with concerned field officers and also the enforcement wings, sources added.