In a meeting chaired by Revenue Secretary Ajay Bhushan Pandey, a panel comprising Central and state GST officers has been proposed to be set up to examine and implement quick measures in a given time frame to curb fraudulent refund claims, including the inverted tax structure refund claims and evasion of GST.

The 2nd National GST Conference of the Commissioners of State Tax and Chief Commissioners of Central Tax was held on Tuesday in New Delhi under the chairmanship of Ajay Bhushan.

In a meeting chaired by Revenue Secretary Ajay Bhushan Pandey, a panel comprising Central and state GST officers has been proposed to be set up to examine and implement quick measures in a given time frame to curb fraudulent refund claims, including the inverted tax structure refund claims and evasion of GST.

The multi-faceted Conference was focused on brainstorming session for streamlining Goods and Services Tax (GST) system and plugging revenue leakages.

This was the 2nd edition of all India Conference where both tax administrations came together formally to build synergy and to share their knowledge and best practices with intent to bring about uniformity in tax administrations.

During the Conference, deliberations were held on a mechanism and machinery for disseminating inter-departmental data among various agencies like GSTC, CBDT, CBIC, FIU, DoR, DGGI and State Tax Administrations etc. in order to achieve efficiency in curbing evasion and augment revenue collection.

Various presentations were made in the conference, notably, Commissioner (Investigation), CBIC presented an overview of fake/fraudulent ITC; DG, DRI, presented few novel cases unearthed by them, including a case having Pan-India operation and methodology to curb misuse of refund of ITC/IGST; DG, ARM, presented use of data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning for early identification of fraudulent practices needing enforcement action to bring a focused approach to the evaders without bringing inconvenience to the genuine taxpayers. CBDT and FIU-India made their presentations on exchange of data and disseminating STR for curbing evasion.

GST policy Wing, CBIC, presented ways to bridge the compliance gap and enhancing revenue, which would result in recovering unmatched credit, reviewing refunds, management of non-filers, reporting of electronic invoice to GST system and comprehensive and coordinated audit.

The Central Tax Zonal office of Mumbai and Vadodara also made presentations regarding best practices being followed by them in compliance management and revenue augmentation in their respective tax administrations. Later Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh also presented the best practices adopted by them.

The approach of strengthening enforcement through data exchange, sharing knowledge and best practices for a common national goal that leads to enhanced compliance management and revenue augmentation and at the same time ensuring that genuine taxpayers are not harassed was welcomed by all.