Businesses Close to 5.4 Lakh are at a Risk of Losing GST Registration

The government has taken the initiative to step up its compliance drive. With this move, about 25,000 businesses who had missed out on filing GST returns in November would be informed by the tax authorities to comply with the requirement by Monday.

Additionally, about 5,43,000 businesses that have defaulted for the last six months or more are at the risk losing their GST registration. At a high-level meeting, officers were asked to comfirm with defaulting taxpayers for filing November returns by the end of the month.

However, the taxpayers were required to file their returns for the transactions done in October in the five days that began on 20 November. The defaulters in November were found based on the previous month’s return statistics.
The taxpayers who have not yet filed their returns shall be sent text messages and emails states an official.
Furthermore, the company that processes tax returns, has also been ordered to send about one lakh text and e-mail reminders a day to the taxpayers, especially to the defaulters, to file a return on time.

The move to push taxpayers to improve compliance has been initiated after GST revenue collections have improved in recent months. Improved economic activities, as well as specific steps to improve compliance, have led to GST receipts of the central and state governments scaling ₹1.05 trillion in October, growing 10.25 percent from the revenue collected in the same month a year ago.

Moreover, this year GST receipts have crossed the Rs.1 trillion mark and reported a double-digit growth rate this fiscal after the sharp decline in the initial months following the national lockdown.
Signaling a zero-tolerance policy on tax evasion, GST authorities this month started a nation-wide crackdown on fake invoice rackets.
Directorate General of GST Intelligence (DGGI) and field officers so far arrested 85 persons for availing of or passing on tax credits fraudulently and have booked 981 cases against 3,119 fake entities.