By TIOL News Service

KOLKATA, FEB 26, 2020: THE Directorate General of GST Intelligence (DGGI), Kolkata Zonal Unit (KZU), yesterday arrested two persons in a case of GST fraud involving Rs. 500 crores of bogus transaction with involvement of GST credit of more than Rs. 96 crores. The fake invoice and input tax racket was busted by DGGI, KZU, on the basis of input received and intelligence further developed by this office. On scrutiny of the returns and documents, this office had made simultaneous search operations in 10 locations which were found to be non-existent fake entities in the course of investigation.

During investigation, the official Press Release claims, a racket, allegedly operated by one Mr. Kamal Kumar Jain with another person namely Mr. Deepak Upadhyay was unearthed. This racket floated number of fake companies which existed only on paper and these companies were involved in passing of fake invoices without any supply of goods or services or both, thereby huge amount of fake Input Tax Credit was passed on to recipient companies across India who availed this fake Credit of GST to meet their tax obligations and thereby depriving the Government of revenue. Money was paid through RTGS benefiting the bogus companies to make the transaction appear regular which was subsequently re-circulated through a complex web of entities keeping the commission amount.

In the process of investigation, a large number of statutory GST documents available in the portal as well as the recovered documents were examined and the said key persons were arrested on 25.02.2020 and produced before the ACJM, Sealdah, who denied the bail to both the accused and remanded them to judicial custody till 06.03.2020. DGGI had already made a recovery of Rs. 5.75 Cr. from the two companies in connection with this case.

Such fake invoices were passed on to companies all over India for availing irregular Input Tax Credit thereby causing a huge loss to the government exchequer.

Similar cases have been unearthed earlier and six arrests were made by DGGI, KZU in the past. Further investigations in those cases are going on.