A homemaker from Pernambut in Vellore received a summons notice from the GST office in Chennai on August 9, for non-payment of GST.
The summons notice said that a business by the name ‘Pacific Exports’, based at Arani in Tiruvannamalai, linked to her Aadhaar and PAN numbers, has not paid the due GST. On August 13, the victim went to the GST office in Anna Nagar in Chennai to enquire about it. The officials asked for her family’s income details, after which she filed a complaint. They asked her to submit a petition at the local police station, the Pernambut police station, from where she was directed to the Vellore District Police Office.
In her petition to the Vellore district police, she wrote, “My Aadhaar and PAN number have been misused without my knowledge. I have no connection with the said entity.”
“All these are unnecessary problems. I am a housewife and have a two-year-old baby. When I had to go to the GST office in Chennai, I had to drop my baby at my neighbour’s house and leave. I went early in the morning and came back at night. It was very difficult to manage.”
“Now, if something comes from the IT department, I don’t know how to handle it,” she added.
The officers at the Vellore District Police Office said more such petitions were coming lately. A sub inspector at the Vellore District Crime Branch (DCB) said that around 3-4 similar cases pour in every month. “In most cases, it’s the poor people, including daily wage workers or the leather company workers who are getting cheated. Also, many women realise that they have been cheated only when their accounts get frozen, citing non-payment of GST and are unable to withdraw the Rs 1,000 that gets credited to their bank accounts as part of the Kalaignar Magalir Urimai Thogai (KMUT) scheme,” he said.
In April, a daily wage labourer in Gudiyatham employed under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) received a tax notice demanding Rs 1.67 crores in dues and penalties from the GST office in Chennai.
The DCB also said that such cases are difficult to solve as they are unable to identify the persons who have misused the Aadhar and PAN documents and that only the GST office can crack it. As of now, they are not registering FIRs and are forwarding these petitions to the respective GST offices.
Another officer at DCB said, “More cases are coming from Pernambut and Gudiyatham. Roughly 20 cases have been reported from these two areas alone in the last year. We suspect that some Xerox shop worker in the area is misusing the public’s Aadhar and PAN documents.” He also said that the GST officers should try to identify the source of this scam by cross checking if the number provided by a business at the time of registration is the same as the one linked with the given Aadhaar or PAN number.
