Goods and services tax (GST) authorities issued demand notices totaling  ₹1.45 lakh crore to around 1,500 businesses in December, a report said. The notices were sent due to inconsistencies in annual returns and input tax credit claims for the financial year 2018, according to officials. 

The significant volume of notices is because of the deadline for serving notices for the 2017-18 period, which was December 31, 2023, Economic Times reported, quoting a senior official, who also informed that the  ₹1.45 lakh crore included penalty and interest.

Additionally, weak tax recovery in cases of evasion also led to a large number of notices issued. The GST officers have detected GST evasion of about  ₹1.51 lakh crore in the current fiscal, but the recovery was  ₹18,541 crore as on December 30. This was much less than the internal target of  ₹50,000 crore, the report said.

The total number of GST returns filed in 2017-18 stood at 72.5 lakh, while only a small proportion of returns were picked up for scrutiny for short payment of taxes, the official told the newspaper.

Around 48,000 GST returns of 2017-18 and 2018-19 were selected for scrutiny by December 30 after discrepancies were detected or if flagged by the system, the report added.

As the deadline for the 2017-18 period has passed, the department has now turned its attention to the fiscal year 2018-19, and officials anticipate that the number of notices may rise in the coming days. 

Additionally, the government has extended the deadline for issuing demand notices related to discrepancies in returns for the 2018-19 and 2019-20, now set at April 30, as opposed to the previous deadline of March 31.

Meanwhile, the government on Sunday said GST officers have detected 29,273 bogus firms involved in fake Input Tax Credit (ITC) claims of  ₹44,015 crore in eight months till December 2023 during a drive against fake registration, which helped save revenue of  ₹4,646 crore.

In the October-December quarter, 4,153 bogus firms that involved suspected ITC evasion of around  ₹12,036 crore were detected. As many as 2,358 of these bogus firms were detected by the Central GST Authorities.