Centre, States to initiate special drive against fake GST registration from 16th May

The Centre and States together are launching two months special drive from Tuesday against GST fraudsters. Experts say every GST assessee needs not panic on such a move.
“A Special All-India Drive may be launched by all Central and State tax administrations from May 16, 2023, to July 15, 2023, to detect suspicious/fake GSTINs and to conduct requisite verification and further remedial action to weed out these fake billers from the GST ecosystem and to safeguard Government revenue,” Central Board of Indirect Taxes & Customs (CBIC) said in an instruction to all of its field formation.
As of date, there are 1.39 crore registered taxpayers, which is more than double of assesses registered during the pre-GST or Central Excise-VAT regime. However, the worrying part is mounting evasion. Last month, officials conceded that GST evasion detection by tax officers almost doubled YoY to over ₹1.01 lakh crore in FY23, out of which a recovery of ₹21,000 crore was made by the officers of the Directorate General of GST Intelligence (DGGI).
In FY22, DGGI, the investigative agency under the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime, detected evasion of over ₹54,000 crore and made a tax recovery of over ₹21,000 crore. The total number of Goods and Services Tax (GST) evasion cases has gone up this fiscal with about 14,000 cases detected in FY23, up from 12,574 cases in FY22 and 12,596 cases in FY21.