The Finance Ministry has asked tax officers to manually verify input tax credit claimed by exporters to prevent any potential fraud.
The Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs identified 5,106 “risky” exporters out of 1.42 lakh based on defined parameters, according to its press statement. The manual verification exercise is being undertaken to prevent unscrupulous exporters from defrauding the exchequer by wrongly claiming integrated goods and services tax refunds, it said. Claims are otherwise processed in an automated manner.
On June 17 and June 18, tax authorities interdicted 1,436 shipping bills of 925 exporters—out of about 20,000 filed by 9,000 exporters. Shipments of exporters categorised as “risky” are being allowed immediately, and their refunds will be released after verification within 30 days.
The government said all genuine exporters would continue to get their IGST refunds in a timely, and automated way.
Manual verification of input tax credit of exporters will help the government in checking IGST tax evasion, said Abhishek Jain, an indirect tax partner at EY India. This, he said, would not affect refunds of genuine exporters as the government has identified a few exporters based on risk parameters.
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