Former Telangana chief secretary Somesh Kumar (right).
Photo Credit: Twitter/SomeshKumarIAS
Hyderabad: Former chief secretary of Telangana, Somesh Kumar, who wielded tremendous influence during BRS' 10-year regime , is now caught thick in the middle of a controversy in connection with the alleged GST fraud of around Rs 1400 crore.
The Central Crime Station (CCS) of Hyderabad police has launched an investigation into the role of Kumar and a few others in the alleged GST evasion scam.
CCS police have registered an FIR against former commercial taxes additional commissioner SV Kasi Visweswara Rao, deputy commissioner Sivaram Prasad, IIT-Hyderabad assistant professor Sobhan Babu, Somesh Kumar and a private IT company, Plianto Technologies Private Limited, for alleged GST violations.
According to the FIR registered by CCS, the commercial taxes department engaged IIT-Hyderabad to mask taxpayer data and failed to include the IGST loss estimate under the IGST head in the issued notices.
The commercial tax department engaged IIT-Hyderabad as a service provider for software development. The service provider's role was to perform analytics and generate discrepancies based on returns filed by taxpayers registered in Telangana.
IIT-Hyderabad masked 11 cases, and preliminary verification revealed evasion of over Rs 1400 crore. According to the FIR, police alleged that one such masked case was that of Telangana State Beverages Corporation Limited.
For example, M/s Big Leap Technologies and Solutions Private Limited, which deals in manpower supplies, passed on an input tax credit worth Rs. 25.51 crore without actually paying any tax to the government.
The desk audit of M/s Big Leap Technologies and Solutions Private Limited identified this discrepancy, but the reports produced by IIT-Hyderabad's "Scrutiny Module" did not.
The commercial taxes department has given a format to IIT-Hyderabad for capturing all four discrepancies among taxpayers, i.e, IGST, CGST, SGST, and CES. However, the commercial tax department observed that in some cases, the system failed to generate IGST and Cess notices.
The systematic exclusion of some cases from notice generation and the hosting of multiple applications on the same server were also among the findings.
The commercial taxes department had also engaged C-DAC to conduct a forensic audit. During the preliminary investigation, it was revealed that the changes to the software developed by IIT Hyderabad were made at the instructions of Somesh Kumar, who operated a special WhatsApp group called 'Special Initiatives'. The instructions were shared on the WhatsApp group.