The Punjab excise and taxation department has recovered ₹2,646.88 crore from tax evaders till February 2022 through the data mining wing formed to detect and analyse revenue leakages in the state.
Data mining wing is a specialised unit established in 2017-18 to help the field formations in detecting tax evasion activities with the help of state’s own excise and taxation technical services agency (ETTSA) and various platforms that include Boweb Portal, e-way bill portal, SAS tool and other advanced software.
It prepares reports upon irregularities and discrepancies detected in the returns filed by the taxpayers based upon data provided by GSTN and ETTSA. These reports are being shared with concerned wings of the department for necessary action and compliance.
“Since the implementation of the GST regime, the taxation commissionerate has collected revenue of ₹2646.88 crore till February 2022 based on the reports generated by the data mining wing. It’s helping us to detect the evasion of tax through data analysis,” said Showkat Ahmad Parray, additional excise and taxation commissioner-cum-chief executive officer of ETTSA.
According to the working of ETTSA, major reports generated by the data mining wing include those on GSTR return defaulters, input tax credit mismatch as per GST return, liability mismatch, interest calculation of late GST return filers, inward (purchases) and outward (sales) mismatch of newly registered dealers among others.
Besides this, the wing is also providing all necessary help to field formations and providing them with the information and data required by them for detecting tax evasion activities through its two dedicated wings established at Mohali and Patiala. It is also conducting a 360-degree analysis of the selected taxpayers to find out bogus dealers to plug the revenue leakages.
Financial commissioner taxation A Venu Prasad said: “We are pioneers in using advanced software and having our own data mining centre to detect tax evasion and bogus billing and ITCs, and it’s yielding good results,” he said.
In GST, the biggest challenge is to detect the bogus billing and subsequent ITC claims.
“Not only we have managed to detect tax evasion of ₹1,948 crore, we have reversed ₹698 crore ITC, which were fraudulently claimed to get tax benefits,” said Prasad.
“The impact of enforcement activities is to create a deterrence effect on tax evaders. The department is deploying another software (SAS tool) to further strengthen the data mining effort through machine learning and analysis,” said Prasad, who is also principal secretary to the chief minister.
Source: hindustantimes.com
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