The Uttar Pradesh State Tax Department has intensified festive-season tax evasion checks and is examining more than 80 reports of suspected GST fraud using analytics tools and digital records. The review is focused on newly registered firms whose turnover, purchases, sales, tax payments and ITC claims do not line up.
Teams from the Special Task Force and the Special Investigation Branch have stepped up their operations, with special vigilance in Lucknow, Kanpur, Noida, Ghaziabad, Meerut and Moradabad. The department is also using the Central Government’s GST Prime analytical tool, along with Business Intelligence and Fraud Analytics, E-Way Bill Analytics, ADVAIT and GIN, to separate routine filings from records that deserve a closer look.
Lucknow and other cities
In Lucknow, Kanpur, Noida, Ghaziabad, Meerut and Moradabad, the scrutiny is centered on newly registered firms that show unusual swings in turnover, purchases, sales, tax payments and ITC claims. Reporting sales worth crores of rupees within a short period is one trigger, as is claiming ITC several times higher than the value of purchases.
The department is also checking for invoices issued without any actual movement of goods and for cases where businesses appear to have deposited less tax than expected for the scale of activity they report. Geo-tagging of business premises during registration is part of the same screening process.
GST Prime and BIFA
GST Prime is being used to detect potentially fraudulent registrations, while the Business Intelligence and Fraud Analytics system is being used to analyze registration details and business data. E-Way Bill Analytics is being used to examine the movement of goods and verify associated records.
ADVAIT and GIN are feeding intelligence inputs and risk signals into the scrutiny, giving investigators a shorter list of transactions to examine first. The review is broad, but it is not automatic proof: officials still have to establish whether the underlying purchases actually took place or were only recorded on paper to obtain tax benefits improperly.
Before returns are filed
The department may open investigations before new businesses file returns if the risk indicators stay high. That makes the current screening the first gate, not the last one.
For businesses that can document real purchases, real movement of goods and matching records, the checks should be routine. For firms that cannot, the scrutiny now begins before the return is even on file.
