Chandigarh: Congress MLA Sukhpal Singh Khaira has written to Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann, urging him to order an inquiry into a tax evasion scam of over Rs 44,000 crore. However, Principal Secretary (Home Affairs) Anurag Verma refuted the allegations as baseless.
In the letter to the CM, the Bholath MLA sought to bring to his notice a massive scam of about Rs 44,000 crore related to goods that arrived in Punjab from 2009 to 2012 and said this was brought to his knowledge by former deputy excise and taxation commissioner Y S Matta. Khaira said for the goods, which were brought to Punjab, the due value added tax was not paid by some unscrupulous dealers.
Khaira said Matta had information that unscrupulous tax evading dealers of Punjab were importing goods worth crores of rupees through containers at Dhandari Kalan dry port in Ludhiana. He claimed that Matta had even shared this information with the then excise and taxation commissioner (ETC) Anurag Verma, who is now the principal secretary.
Matta was asked to share this information to the director, economic intelligence unit (EIU)-cum-director enforcement, said Khaira. However, he said that the EIU was supposed to tally the data of imports with the returns of the dealers of Punjab and where the import data did not tally with the returns.
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Khaira demanded that in view of the alleged loot of VAT, an inquiry by the Comptroller Auditor General of India be ordered. Meanwhile, Principal Secretary Anurag Verma said Matta himself had remained in charge of five districts as the joint director (investigation), Bathinda, and another five districts as the DETC, Amritsar.
Had there been some tax evasion, why didn't he himself detect a single case in these 10 districts out of this data, said Verma in a statement. Whatever information was given by Matta to the Economic Intelligence Unit (EIU), discrepancies in only three cases were detected.
As ETC, I gave instructions for taking strict action in these cases. However, when these dealers were confronted with these discrepancies, they produced their books of account showing that they had fully reflected the imports in their books. Hence, the taxation officers concerned concluded that no tax evasion had been made, said Verma.
Verma said as per the EIU report submitted to him, the quality of data brought by Matta was very poor. Verma said the department had undertaken a massive exercise of verification of the data provided by Matta and had found that out of Rs 44,000 crore worth of goods, transactions related to Rs 43,900 crore had been duly recorded by dealers in their books. Only a discrepancy of Rs 95 crore with maximum possible tax liability of Rs 5 crore was left, which was under verification, said Verma. (PTI)
