TaxTMI 
TaxTMI 
Prevention of fake registration and bogus ITC claims - and role of Tax officers under GST.
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....with several steps to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the Tax department, the following instructions/ guidelines are hereby issued for compliance by all Tax Officers: A) Registration: Various modus operandi of obtaining such fake registrations have been detected by Central and State Tax administrations. In some cases, identities of other persons like PAN, Aadhaar, etc. have been misused without their knowledge to obtain GST registration. Forged documents, such as forged electricity bills, property tax receipts, rent agreements, etc. are also being used as proof of principal place of business to obtain GST registration. In some cases, forged identities have been created by using same photo of a person on different Aadhaar ....
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....verification of applications for registration at the end of tax officers in a uniform manner: 1) Scrutiny of Documents: FORM GST REG-01 prescribes a list of documents to be uploaded by the applicant in respect of photograph, constitution of business, principal place of business, bank account, etc. The proper officer shall carefully scrutinize the said documents to ensure that the documents are legible, complete and relevant. Further, the details or information furnished by the applicant in the application should also be carefully examined by the proper officer to check completeness of the same, to correlate and cross-verify the same with the uploaded documents and to check the authenticity of the applicant. The details of the addre....
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.... (iii) whether any application for registration on the PAN of the applicant has been rejected previously; (iv) whether the place of business of the applicant appears to be risky based on local risk parameters; (v) whether the proof of address of place(s) of business prima facie appear to be suspicious/ doubtful on the basis of scrutiny of the application and the documents. 3) Aadhaar verification: As mentioned above, the misuse of Aadhaar poses a fresh challenge to weed out the fake applicants. Hence, it is necessary to verify all relevant details viz. photograph, mobile number, email id, etc. of the application with the details as present in Aadhaar records vis-à-vis as displayed on the GSTN portal. Any d....
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.... such application and inform the applicant electronically in FORM GST REG- 05. 6) Mandatory field visit: Pre-registration field verification shall be conducted mandatorily prior to approval of new registration under GST to check the authenticity of the applicant. The detailed procedure in this regard has already been circulated in Para 4.2 & 4.3 of Instruction No. 01/2020-GST, and Para 5& Para 6 of Instruction No. 4/2021-GST 7) Adherence to time-limit: While processing the applications for registration, it will be ensured by the proper officer that the application is either rejected or accepted or relevant query is raised within the prescribed time limit and no application for grant of registration is approved on deemed ba....
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....indicating large numbers of mismatches and contradictions in the returns and statements filed by the taxpayers leading to loss of revenue. Hence, the jurisdictional officers shall ensure that the following actions in the matter of ITC is taken: 1) Entities that have claimed and passed on Input Tax Credit (ITC) exceeding Rs 10 lakh in the last two financial years shall undergo thorough verification. 2) Works Contractors claiming high amounts of tax credit must be examined, particularly if they source inputs/raw materials from outside the state. Special focus should be to find out if there is any nexus of bill trading. 3) Deputy/Assistant Commissioners of State Tax and Superintendent of State Tax are required to scr....