Ludhiana cos pay maximum penalty in 3-day SGST raids

Ludhiana: The mobile enforcement wing of the state goods and services tax department has seized a huge cache of documents and unbilled goods in back-to-back anti-evasion actions in the last three days here. The defaulting companies have invited a huge penalty statewide but the highest collection has been from Ludhiana district.
Conforming the development, Ludhiana SGST department’s director enforcement H P S Ghotra said: “Based upon directions of state taxation commissioner K K Yadav, the teams from the Ludhiana GST department’s mobile enforcement wing conducted five inspections of various companies, covering dozens of their offices. The profile list includes transporters, tobacco traders, and iron scrap dealers.
The inspecting teams claim to have detected a lot of anomalies in the filing of the state GST. They seized in-transit goods such as hosiery items, tobacco, aluminium, mobile accessories, and nut-bolts from the warehouses of several transporters. Nine vehicles of transporters with default history were seized. These carried tobacco, electric and electronic items, fabric, nut-bolts, copper and aluminium goods. Penalties running into several lakh rupees were collected from these transporters.
Ghotra said: “One of the vehicles that we seized was found loaded with copper scrap, for which there was no bill, so a penalty of Rs 21 lakh was imposed on the company concerned on account of ingenuine purchases. Based on the mined data and a recce of the premises, two companies were inspected and one of those was found to be non-existing. This bogus company had done bogus billing to claim input tax credit (ITC) fraudulently, while the other company had not bill for its stock of aluminium, lead ingots, and scrap.”
Incriminating documents were seized, while the tax and penalty will be imposed subject to verification of these papers after affording proper explanation opportunities to the owners. Ghotra claimed that besides Ludhiana, the different divisions had also conducted inspections in Shambu, Patiala, Jalandhar, and Amritsar. In these operations, they had collected a huge amount as penalty.