Geotagging may become must for GST registrations

The Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) is looking to further strengthen the process of Goods and Services Tax registration by using geotagging for verification. The board is also planning to use biometric authentication for the existing registration, which it found suspicious or risky, its chairman Vivek Johri said

"In the past it was found that an office place was created just for verification and it was not there subsequently. To prevent this, the geotagging location of the office of an entity will be made mandatory," he said.

The board has already initiated a pilot in some states to geotag the address for the exact location.


Geotagging functionality is being rolled out in phases, and as of now, is only available to taxpayers registered in Delhi and Haryana.

He added that once the pilot is complete, the report may be submitted to the GST Council to make it mandatory post the council's approval.

The Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN), which is the technology backbone of the GST system in India, had introduced the feature on the GST portal in March itself.

The CBIC chairman added that for the registration already done and which the department finds suspicious, it may use biometric authentication.

Currently, officials establish the identity of the person via OTP-based authentication using Aadhaar and PAN.

"We are now going in for biometric authentication so that we can be absolutely certain that this is the person whose Aadhaar card has been used," Johri said.

The move comes after an ongoing two-month drive against fake GST registration in which the authorities detected rampant misuse of PAN and Aadhaar for fake GST registration.

The officials had through data analytics zeroed in on 60,000 suspicious GST registrations. Verification process was completed for 50,000 registrations, out of which 25% GST registrations were found to be fake. Recovery of ₹3,000 crore has already been made during the drive.

"I warn those who continue to do this that we will come at them with a very heavy hand... we want a larger but clean taxpayer base so that honest taxpayers are protected," Johri said on the sidelines of an event on Saturday.