It refers to government-reply in Parliament that a total of 9385 cases of tax fraud involving amount of rupees 45683 crore has been detected by the tax authorities under the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime since its rollout from July 1, 2017 out of which, 1,593 tax fraud cases involving an amount of Rs 6520.40 crore have been detected in April-June.
It has become a common practice to sell GST-invoices to those availing false Input Tax Credit (ITC) when consumers do not insist on taking invoices or leave these invoices by getting some petty discount. These unused GST invoices are purchased by manufacturers to avail false ITC further leading to creation of unaccounted money thus evading even Income Tax also.
ITC should be available only for trading purpose, and not for manufacturing and service sector. Instead GST slabs can be reduced to compensate those who avail ITC honestly. For this GST in manufacturing and service sector may be kept at lower slab of 12-percent, even though best is to have a common lower slab of 10-percent abolishing slabs of 0, 3, 5 and 12-percent. Such a common 10-percent slab will give added revenue to public-exchequers with even commoners ultimately being relieved even though gimmick slabs of 0, 3 and 5 percent may be abolished.
Another higher slab of 30-percent may be for luxury and other goods of long-time use like even including air-conditioners, refrigerators, TV sets, washing-machines, cars etc where in some cases GST-slab was recently reduced from 28-percent to 18-percent. Even cess-culture on extra-luxurious items should be replaced by higher GST slabs in multiples of 50-percent.
SUBHASH CHANDRA AGRAWAL