GST officers have been armed with real-time data on commercial vehicle traffic on highways through the integration of Electronic Invoicing System (EWB) with FasTag and RFID, a measure that will help with live vigilance of these vehicles and verify the GST evasion. Additional features have been added to the tax agents’ e-way bill mobile app, which will provide them with real-time e-way invoice and vehicle tracking details to help them catch tax evaders who misuse the e-way billing system.
Under the goods and services tax (GST) regime, electronic invoices have become mandatory for the interstate transport of goods valued at over Rs 50,000 from April 2018. However, gold is exempt. . In the electronic invoicing system (e-way), businesses and carriers must present the e-way invoice to a GST inspector, if requested.
On average, 25 lakh of freight vehicle movements from more than 800 tolls are reported daily to the electronic invoicing system. The integration of e-way bill, RFID and FasTag will allow tax agents to undertake live vigilance with regard to companies’ compliance with e-way invoices and will help prevent revenue leakage by identifying in real time cases of recycling of ISF, non generation of ISF. Taxpayers can now access reports on vehicles that have passed selected tolls without electronic invoices in the last few minutes. In addition, vehicles carrying state specific critical cargo that have exceeded the selected toll can be viewed. All suspicious vehicles and ISF vehicles generated by GSTINs from suspicious taxpayers, which have passed the selected toll in near real time, can also be viewed in this report.
Officers can use these reports while conducting vigilance and making vigilance activity more effective. In addition, officers in the audit and enforcement wing can use these reports to identify fraudulent transactions such as exchanging invoices, recycling ISFs. Rajat Mohan, senior partner at AMRG Associates, said “Real-time online tracking of vehicles and cargo would go a long way in tightening the lid on tax evaders. This mobile application for tax officials would allow them to capture all stakeholders involved in the illegal removal of goods. Abhishek Jain, tax partner of EY India, said that CBIC had previously indicated its intention to further digitize the process of enforcing electronic invoice provisions under the GST law, and in accordance with This idea, the electronic invoicing system has now been integrated with the FasTag and RFID system, and the MIS (Management Information Systems) reports thereof will be available on the agent’s mobile app. is a commendable gesture on the part of of government and points to the development in the area of ​​technology and how the government is proactive in using it to ensure tax compliance and track fraudulent activity, â€Jain added.
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Last month, in a report titled ‘E-way Bill – A Three-Year Journey, the government said 180 crore e-way bills had been generated in three years through March 2021. Of that number, only 7 crore invoices have been verified by tax. officers. In fiscal year 2020-2021, ended March 2021, 61.68 crore of electronic invoices were generated, of which 2.27 crore were collected for verification.
During the 2019-2020 fiscal year, which ended in March 2020, 62.88 crore of electronic invoices were generated, of which 3.01 crore were collected for verification by tax officials. The top five states in which a maximum number of electronic invoices for interstate movement of goods has been generated are Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka.
The top five sectors where the maximum electronic transport bills have been generated over the past three years are textiles, electrical machinery, mechanical machinery and appliances, iron and steel, and automobiles. As of January 1, 2021, the government has integrated RFID / FasTag with the electronic invoicing system and the carrier is required to have an RFID tag in their vehicle and the details of the electronic invoice generated for the goods carried by the carrier. the vehicle is downloaded into the RFID. When the vehicle passes the RFID tag reader on the highway, the details fed into the device are uploaded to the government portal. This information is then used by revenue officers to validate supplies made by a GST registrant.
To improve tax compliance, the government has also started blocking the generation of EWB invoices if a GST-registered taxpayer has not filed a GSTR-3B return in the last two consecutive months. In addition, the government has blocked the generation of several ISFs on a single bill. If the ISF is generated once using an invoice number or document number, neither party can generate another ISF using the same invoice number.
In addition, the electronic invoicing system enabled automatic calculation of the distance based on PIN codes. The system will automatically calculate the distance between the source and the destination, based on the PIN codes.
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