The Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) is set to scale up scrutiny and departmental audits of risky taxpayers to improve goods and services tax (GST) collections while using data and technology to ensure that officials make decisions transparently, chairman Vivek Johri said in an interview.

That would mean more services such as electric vehicle charging stations and service centres emerging as sources of GST collections, while an emphasis on tax compliance in domestic transactions and a wider tax base helps make up for the lower usage of fossil fuels for revenue collections.

In an interview, the CBIC chairman said that compliance improvement measures taken by the department are already showing in GST collections and that there is scope for augmenting revenue further by taking some more measures in GST.

CBIC, he said, was already focusing on those now.

“Apart from verifying that those who come into the tax base file their returns and pay their taxes, what we need to also look at now—and we have already started because it is very much part of any tax administration—is the need to scrutinize the returns properly to see that the data that has been turned in is valid and compares well with the financials which the business has reported. We will deal with this with scrutiny and audit," said Johri.

He explained that these are the two limbs of CBIC’s compliance management strategy. States are also focusing on that, he said.

Currently, CBIC conducts scrutiny and departmental audits based on certain red flag reports raised by the system because of discrepancies. Now the effort is to make the scrutiny and departmental audit cases more systematic and structured based on risk parameters.