New Delhi: The Income Tax Department (IT-D) on Tuesday December 21 said it has recently carried out searches at the premises of two prominent Asansol-based groups that deal into iron, steel products, infrastructure, cement, poly fabs, agro-tech and food processing. A senior IT-D official said that the search action covered more than 30 premise in West Bengal.
A large number of incriminating evidence in the form of documents and digital data stored in SD cards, WhatsApp chats, were found and seized.
The search team has detected that SD cards have been used to keep details of a parallel set of unaccounted sales, excel sheets of actual production data, parallel tally accounts files, cash payment details made to various parties.
A preliminary analysis of the seized SD cards and related evidence revealed that these contain unaccounted cash handled by key employees of the directors and owners of the entities.
The key persons of one of the groups have admitted that unaccounted income of more than Rs 66 crore has been generated through unaccounted cash sales from its manufacturing units during the financial year 2020-21.
In certain other entities, evidence have been found relating to claim of unsubstantiated purchases, out of which purchases to the extent of Rs 20 crore were admitted by the directors as undisclosed income.
Analysis of seized evidence of another group revealed that many paper companies, which are run by entry operators, used to provide accommodation entries to its flagship concerns.
These shell entities have been found to have routed back the unaccounted money of the group in the guise of share capital/unsecured loan into the books of account of these entities.
It has been corroborated, with admission by directors of these entities concerned, that, quantum of such routing exceeds Rs 40 crore.
Thus, the search action has unearthed various methods of tax evasion adopted by the groups such as unaccounted cash sales, inflation of expenses through claim of bogus purchases and routing of unaccounted income through accommodation entries.
The search has resulted in seizure of unaccounted cash and jewellery of more than Rs 2 crore and has, so far, led to detection of total unaccounted income exceeding Rs 125 crore.
Further investigation is underway.
