Punjab Finance, Planning, Excise and Taxation Minister Advocate Harpal Singh Cheema on Saturday led the Tax department teams to conduct a special checking drive at Rajpura-Sirhind, G.T. Road. Around 150 vehicles carrying Iron scrap, Mixed goods, Furniture, Parcel, Black ash, steel pipes, Rice, bricks etc were checked during this special drive.
Out of these, 38 vehicles were detained for verification as most of them were either not supported by genuine documents/ E-Way bills or dis-ingenious inward supply while carrying out data mining then and there. A tentative penalty and fine of Rs. 60 lakh will be imposed on the detained vehicles.
Revealing this in a statement issued here, Excise and taxation Minister Harpal Singh Cheema said that repeated information was received from various sources that the GST was being evaded for the goods being transported by some trucks and other vehicles.
He said that acting on this information, he along with a team of the tax department checked the vehicles on the national highway near Rajpura.Cheema said that strict action has been initiated against all such tax evaders whereas vehicles transporting goods with correct bills were allowed to pass without any harassment.
He said that this drive was mainly aimed to deter the tax evaders and to perpetuate a message from the Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann led Punjab Government to the genuine tax payers that there would be no harassment to them at all. He said that the taxation department has also provided a bilingual WhatsApp Chatbot-cum-helpline number 9160500033 to assist honest taxpayers.
Reiterating that tax evasion would not be tolerated in the state, Cheema said that the Data Mining Wing has been detecting tax evasion activities with the help of ETTSA (Departments own Technical Service Agency) and various other platforms.
He further added that the Data Mining Wing prepares reports based upon irregularities and discrepancies detected in the data provided by GSTN and ETTSA and these reports were being shared with concerned wings of the department for necessary action besides ensuring the compliance from them.
He said that the Taxation department has also established a new Tax Intelligence Unit (TIU) in the State GST Commissionerate to monitor GSTN platform for better analyses of the digital data available over it.In this drive, Taxation Commissioner K.K. Yadav, Addl Commissioner-I Viraj S. Tidke, Director Investigation H.P.S. Ghotra, ACST MW Jalandhar Kamalpreet Singh also accompanied the Excise and Taxation Minister.