DGGI Jaipur has busted a syndicate that fraudulently claimed ITC of Rs 1,047 crore. GST fraud news: Officers from the Jaipur Zonal Unit of Directorate General of GST Intelligence (DGGI) have uncovered a Delhi-based syndicate that was operating 569 phony companies. The group had created invoices having taxable turnover of Rs. 6,022 crore with fraudulent input tax credit (ITC) amounting to Rs 1,047 crore through these fake companies.
Majority of these fake firms are located in Delhi. They are also spread across 13 other states, including Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Gujarat.
According to a statement by the Ministry of Finance, published by PIB, the DGGI Jaipur officials nabbed the mastermind, 30 year old Rishabh Jain, after extensive recce and data analytics. Jain’s had hired 10 employees for operating these fake firms.
The syndicate’s modus operandi points towards the close nexus with various brokers. These middlemen were crucial for purchasing firms, bank accounts, SIM Cards, and to manage their Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS)/cash transfers and mediate between them and beneficiary firms.
In its statement, the Finance Ministry said that “there are brokers/agents [that] specialise in registering firms on GSTN using IDs of poor, needy, and susceptible people and sell these registered firms to syndicates, who further issue fake invoices through them.”
The authorities have attached 73 bank accounts used by syndicate and brokers so far.
DGGI, Jaipur Zonal Unit has detected as many as 142 cases of fake ITC involving an aggregate Rs 1,327 crore during financial year 2022-23. In the current fiscal, the body has uncovered at least 5 fake ITC cases involving Rs 1,531 crore.
This unit is dedicated to take all preventive steps to find more such syndicates and their masterminds, who are jeopardising administration of GST by issuing fake bills. This unit had succeeded in cracking 2 big syndicates within the past week alone. On June 19, it nabbed two masterminds from Jaipur for running a fake ITC syndicate of Rs 320 crore.
