By Admin 
Restaurants Tax Scam: The Income Tax Department has exposed large-scale tax evasion in the restaurant sector of the country. The Investigation Wing of the Income Tax Department on Sunday surveyed about 70 restaurants across the country. Its objective is to detect the case of hiding sales of Rs 70,000 crore through manipulation in billing software.
Restaurant owners made a mistake
Some such things are coming to light that in many cities across the country, some restaurant owners manipulated the backend of a particular billing software and either edited or deleted the cash invoices after giving bills to the customers.
The states from where incidents of tax evasion in the restaurant sector are coming to light include Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat. The 70 restaurants are spread across around 45 cities from Madurai to Shimla and Godhra to Guwahati. These also include Delhi and Mumbai. There is a suspicion of hiding sales worth about Rs 700 crore in this survey being conducted on restaurants.
In which cities the survey is being conducted?
In Andhra Pradesh, surveys were conducted in Rajahmundry, Nellore and Visakhapatnam. Other cities include Mumbai, Thane, Pune and Amravati in Maharashtra, Gurugram in Haryana, Noida, Hapur, Ghaziabad and Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, Chennai, Coimbatore and Madurai in Tamil Nadu, Korba in Chhattisgarh, Samalkha in Haryana, Shimla in Himachal Pradesh, Jalandhar, Amritsar and Ludhiana in Punjab, Puri, Cuttack and Bhubaneswar in Odisha, Jaipur and Ajmer in Rajasthan, Malappuram in Kerala and Surveys are being conducted in Kozhikode, Kolkata and Siliguri in West Bengal, Guwahati in Assam, Patna and Saran in Bihar and Koderma in Jharkhand.
AI’s help is being taken
To expose this scam, the Income Tax Department is taking the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data analytics tools. After analyzing approximately 60 terabytes (TB) of transactional data, it was discovered that the data contained in the servers had been deleted by the restaurant owners. The theft was detected when 6 years of data was analyzed and UPI payments of customers and GST returns of restaurants were matched.
It was revealed that the restaurants used the ‘Bulk Delete’ feature of the software to save tax. Through this, the records of cash earnings from customers were completely deleted from the system. Or the bill given to them in lieu of payment in cash was manipulated, for example, if a bill was made for Rs 2000, it was edited to Rs 20. In some cases, the entire month’s sales data was erased so that taxes and GST could not be paid.
The investigation also found that maximum tax evasion took place in states like Karnataka, Telangana and Tamil Nadu. Maharashtra and Gujarat are also not behind in this matter.
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