GST raid on 14 showrooms in 11 Odisha cities for tax evasion

By Express News Service

BHUBANESWAR: Launching a crackdown towards unscrupulous merchants, the GST enforcement wing on Wednesday, November 17, 2021, carried out simultaneous raids at 14 furnishings showrooms in 11 cities throughout the State. Acting on inputs on evasion of GST, the officers carried out the raids at Bhubaneswar, Cuttack, Rourkela, Sambalpur, Berhampur, Bhawanipatna, Bargarh, Kendrapara, Bhadrak, Kantabanji and Balasore.

As many as 32 groups consisting of about 136 officers have been engaged within the search and inspection of showrooms and manufacturing models. Physical stocktaking was occurring in these administrative center/manufacturing amenities and at their secret godowns until the final reviews got here in. 

Initial reviews mentioned a lot of the merchants have been discovered to have been paying insignificant quantity of tax in money. They have been additionally discovered to be concerned in manufacturing/buying and promoting items out of account.A senior GST official mentioned primarily based on intensive knowledge evaluation and intelligence collected from varied sources, simultaneous raids have been carried out on a number of furnishings producers/wholesalers concerned in buying and promoting of furnishings out of account with out tax invoices. 

“During inspection, huge quantities of high-value furniture are found to have been stockpiled for clandestine trade. The stocktaking process is expected to continue due to large volume of materials and furniture,” he mentioned. 

Most of the taxpayers have been unable to provide common books of accounts akin to buy, sale and inventory register earlier than the inspecting officers immediately which signifies that they’re disclosing their buy and gross sales and cost of tax as per their very own candy will and never as per precise gross sales, the official knowledgeable. The GST Commissioner has requested inspecting officers to grab the unaccounted shares and full the investigation quickly after manufacturing of full set of books of accounts.

Meanwhile, the enforcement wing, which had concurrently raided 18 jewelry retailers situated in 12 totally different cities on October 4 discovered the companies had paid solely Rs 12.66 lakh as tax in money in 5 months from April to August.