Few commercial vehicle drivers prefer to avoid GST based on the route that they are traveling. Now, it might become neigh impossible for them to do so. GST vigilantes have been given access to real-time data of commercial vehicle movement on highways with the integration of the e-way bill (EWB) system with FasTag and RFID, a move which will help in live vigilance tracking of such vehicles and check GST evasion. This makes even more sense now with FASTag being mandated across all vehicles – private or commercial. Additional features have been added to the e-way bill mobile application of tax officers, which will provide them real-time tracking details of e-way bill and vehicle to help them nab tax evaders who are misusing the e-way bill system. Under the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime, e-way bills have been made mandatory for inter-state transportation of goods valued over Rs 50,000 from April 2018. However, gold is exempted.
These e-way bills too have to be produced before a GST officer, if required. It is said that more than 25 lakh goods vehicles pass through 800 toll plazas in India daily. These use the e-way bill system. The integration of e-way bill, RFID and FasTag will enable tax officers to undertake live vigilance in respect of e-way bill compliances by businesses and will aid in preventing revenue leakage by real-time identification of cases of recycling of EWBs, non-generation of EWBs. Reports of these vehicles will be generated and the officers can view these. Also, the vehicles carrying critical commodities specific to the state and have passed the selected toll can be viewed. Any suspicious vehicles and vehicles of EWBs generated by suspicious taxpayer GSTINs , that have passed the selected toll on a near real-time basis, can also be viewed in this report.
If an e-way bill has been recycled, even this shows up in the report. The top five states in which generated maximum number of e-way bill for inter-state movement of goods were generated are Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. The government has blocked the generation of multiple EWBs on one invoice. If the EWB is once generated using an invoice number or document number, then none of the other parties can generate another EWB using the same invoice number. Besides, the e-way bill’s system has enabled auto calculation of distance based on PIN codes. The system will auto calculate the distance between the source and destination, based on PIN codes.
With inputs from PTI
