PANAJI
The finance ministry has said as much as Rs 1,599.42 crore of Goods and Services Tax (GST) evasion has happened in the State of Goa over the last four financial years.
According to Union Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary, the Central finance department has achieved success in recovering just Rs 198 crore from this amount.
Chaudhary who made these revelations in the Rajya Sabha has also said that no individual from Goa has been hauled up or arrested for tax evasion in these four years.
The information furnished by Chaudhary also revealed that the maximum evasion happened in 2019-20 when GST aggregating Rs 1,333.37 crore was evaded.
In the subsequent pandemic year 2020-21, the evasion of GST in Goa was pegged at Rs 74.23 crore while it was Rs 147.09 crore in 2021-22.
In 2022-23, Rs 43.92 crore of GST was evaded, Chaudhary's dossier on GST evasion in the country revealed.
Efforts for recovery of this evaded GST haven't shown encouraging results with just 4 per cent (Rs 57.14 crore) netted in 2019-20.
In 2020-21, the recovery of evaded tax improved a notch while in the current financial year, Rs 61.27 crore which is 82 per cent of the amount evaded was recovered, Chaudhary said.
On the flip-side, gross GST collections from Goa have increased over the last few years, he said, adding that in the last eight months, around Rs 2,600 crore of revenue has been generated from GST with the month of April alone netting Rs 620 crore.
As against last year, GST revenues in April were 32 per cent higher and in August the increase was 36 per cent, year-on-year.
Overall in the country, Maharashtra topped the list of States with highest GST evasion grossing Rs 1 lakh crore between April 2022 and October 2023. In Karnataka, the evasion was to the extent of Rs 30,000 crore while it was Rs 28,000 crore in West Bengal.
Other States where GST evasion was high include Haryana where Rs 23,000 crore was lost and Gujarat which accounted for Rs 22,000 crore in GST losses.
Meanwhile, Chaudhary said, 71 'show cause' notices have been issued to online gaming companies relating to GST evasion of around Rs 1.12 lakh crore in the period between April 2022 and October 2023.
Earlier this year, Goa’s casino industry came in the cross-hairs of the Union finance ministry’s GST recovery system with several players having been issued tax recovery demands.
Last week however, Deta Corp, the BSE-listed company which operates the Deltin brand off-shore casinos in Goa got some relief when the Calcutta High Court granted interim relief to one of its units in the Rs 6,384 crore GST payment shortfall notice it received in October. The order said, no effect be given to any order passed by the tax authority related to the show-cause notice.
