ON TRAIL OF
DEFAULTERS
* Organisers of Timeout music extravaganza fail to pay entertainment tax and as a result are served with a show cause notice by post from the commercial taxes department * The notice has come back without any remarks leaving the commercial taxes department wondering as to what could be the possible reason
* The commercial taxes department says that it expects a tax revenue of Rs 2.5-3 crores from the organisers of Timeout
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PANAJI: In what has come as a shocker, the show-cause notice sent to Timeout organisers by the Commercial Taxes Department has come back without any remark, indicating that the organisers of electronic-dance-music (EDM) festival are untraceable.
The show-cause notice was sent to the organisers of Timeout after they failed to pay taxes to the state government by the due date of January 22. The organisers of the show are yet to pay the tax as the show-cause notice sent by post has come back.
Dipak M Bandekar, Commissioner, Commercial Taxes, said, “The show-cause notice sent by us to the organisers of Timeout has come back to us with no remarks. Typically, if a notice comes back, it has remarks like “unclaimed”, but in this case, there were no remarks. We are also enquiring with the postal authorities as to what could be the possible reason behind this. We had sent the show-cause notice to the organisers of Timeout in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.”
Bandekar continued, “I have also written to the tourism department asking them to not release the security deposit to the organisers if at all they had made a deposit like that.”
The officials of Commercial Taxes Department have been complaining of poor co-operation on the part of organisers ever since Timeout happened between December 27 and 29 last year at Vagator.
Moreover, the organisers of Timeout have not shared any sort of details about number of visitors and etc with The Commercial Taxes Department either. Neither the details were shared nor the tax was paid and now even the show-cause notice has come back to the state government.
When asked how much tax revenue the state government expects from Timeout organisers, Bandekar replied, “I think around Rs 2.5-3 crores is due from the organisers of Timeout on account of state government’s share of goods-and-services-tax (GST) and value-added-tax (VAT).”
Meanwhile, The Commercial Taxes Department is getting the information about Timeout from other sources to build a compelling case.
Bandekar said, “Paytm has already told us how many tickets were sold through them at Timeout. Now, we are waiting for the details from Bookmyshow.”
