PremiumNew Delhi: About 25,000 businesses who missed filing Goods and Services Tax (GST) return in November will get text messages and emails from tax authorities urging them to comply with the requirement by Monday as the government steps up its compliance drive.
Also, about 5,43,000 businesses that have defaulted for the last six months or more risk losing their GST registration. At a high level meeting, officers were asked to follow up with defaulting tax payers for filing November returns by the end of the month, said a revenue department official.
Tax payers were required to file their return for the transactions done in October in the five days starting 20 November. The defaulters in November were identified based on the previous month’s return statistics.
All such taxpayers who have not yet filed their returns shall be sent text messages and emails, the official said on condition of anonymity.
GSTN, the company that processes tax returns, has also been asked to send one lakh text and e-mail reminders a day to the taxpayers, particularly to the defaulters, to file return on time, the official said.
The move to nudge tax payers to improve compliance comes after GST revenue collections have improved in recent months. Improved economic activities as well as specific steps to improve compliance have led to GST receipts of the central and state governments scaling ₹1.05 trillion in October, growing 10.25% from the revenue collected in same month a year ago.
This is the first time GST receipts have crossed the ₹1 trillion mark and reported double-digit growth rate this fiscal after the sharp decline in the initial months following the national lockdown.
Signalling a zero-tolerance policy on tax evasion, GST authorities this month started a nation-wide crackdown on fake invoice rackets.
Directorate General of GST Intelligence (DGGI) and field officers so far arrested 85 persons for availing of or passing on tax credits fraudulently and have booked 981 cases against 3,119 fake entities, the official said.
