Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman asks officials to strengthen GST registration process

New Delhi: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has asked the officials to strengthen the Goods and Service Tax (GST) registration process by leveraging technology to curb the entry of fake entities in the GST ecosystem. She called for a nationwide campaign to explain the objectives of the special drive to weed out fake entities.

The Minister chaired a review meeting of the ongoing drive against fake billing for GST evasion in New Delhi yesterday, June 16. The meeting was attended by Revenue Secretary Sanjay Malhotra and Central Board of Indirect Taxes Chairman Vivek Johri. 

During the



meeting, the Finance Minister was briefed about action being taken against fake registrations. She was told that more than 11 thousand registrations have already been detected and action has been initiated. 

She took note of the existing measures being undertaken including OTP-based verification of Aadhar and the pilot of biometric-based Aadhar authentication at the time of registration in high-risk cases. Officials apprised the Finance Minister that Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning tools are being extensively used to identify possible fake networks