GST panel probing 67 lakh entities

THE GST Council is verifying 66.79 lakh new registrations by taxpayers on the suspicion that they could be fake or pertain to shell companies, Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi, who is also the convenor of Group of Ministers (GoM) on integrated GST, said on Monday.

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“The new taxpayers, who are 66.8 lakh in number, hardly pay 15% of tax which is about Rs 10,000 crore. Hence, we are strictly monitoring the new taxpayers to ensure they are not fake,” he told journalists after the GoM meeting.

He said the number of active taxpayers has gone up to 1.21 crore since the launch of the goods and services tax (GST), of which 66.79 lakh are new registrations. Many states have started physically verifying these companies by visiting the premises, geo- tagging the location and uploading the photographs on the system from mobile phones, he added.