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Star Health and Allied Insurance Company Ltd on Thursday announced that it had received a tax demand order for Rs 170 crore, along with a penalty of Rs 8.7 crore on non-payment of GST liability on the re-insurance commission received by the company during the period April 2018 to March 2019. “The company has received a demand order from the Office of the Deputy Commissioner (ST)-II, Large Taxpayers Unit, Chennai-35 under Section 73 of the Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017, February 14, 2024, alleging a total demand of Rs 170,67,13,561 and imposing a penalty of Rs 8,67,25,664. The alleged demand and the impugned demand order pertains to non-payment of GST liability on the re-insurance commission received by the company during the period April 2018 to March 2019,” the company said in a regulatory filing.

In a major crackdown to curb Goods and Services Tax (GST) leakage by foreign airlines operating in India, the Directorate General of GST Intelligence (DGGI) is understood to have issued summons to the Indian offices of these airlines. According to sources, "DGGI has summoned Indian offices of all foreign airlines for alleged tax evasion on account of import of services from head office by Indian branch offices. And detailed clarifications have been sought, and DGGI is in talks with all foreign airlines."DGGI, the investigative arm under the GST regime, alleges that foreign airlines, headquartered abroad have branch offices in India that are permitted by RBI to remit forex related to passenger sales and cargo sales, however, other air services are offered by the head office abroad which include rental, maintenance of aircraft, crew salary, etc. Thus, these services coming from abroad were liable to GST under the reverse charge mechanism, which these airlines have not paid.

More than two years after it was first announced by the market regulator SEBI, the proposed trading in the country’s first spot physical gold exchange product, Electronic Gold Receipt, remains a non-starter due to taxation issues. EGRs are like depository gold receipts traded on the stock exchanges and held in demat accounts, just like shares. In the Union Budget 2021-22, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced the setting up of a SEBI-regulated gold spot exchange, and the entire bullion industry welcomed the move as it was operating in a vacuum without regulatory oversight. Subsequently, in September 2021, SEBI introduced two new investment instruments, EGR and silver ETFs, in its board meeting. It also laid down a detailed guideline for EGR and gave approval to BSE to launch gold EGR on its platform. While silver ETF has taken off nicely, EGR has hit the wall due to the GST issue.

Getting credit from banks and other financial institutions for GST assessments will be more seamless as the GST portal can now share data with public tech platforms for frictionless credit only after consent. Experts believe that such a move will also have an impact on compliance. According to the notification by the Finance Ministry, ‘Public tech platform for frictionless credit’ means an enterprise-grade open architecture information technology platform conceptualized by the RBI and developed by its wholly-owned subsidiary, Reserve Bank Innovation Hub. It is meant for the operations of a large ecosystem of credit and to ensure access to information from various data sources digitally and where the financial service providers and multiple data service providers converge on the platform using standard and protocol-driven architecture, open and shared Application Programming Interface (API) framework.