Politics · India Bureau
Delhi court mandates biometric Aadhaar for all GST registrations
The Delhi High Court has directed tax authorities to enforce mandatory biometric Aadhaar authentication for Goods and Services Tax registration, citing a surge in fraudulent filings that have facilitated massive tax evasion schemes.
LSN India ·
A bench of Justices Anil Kshetarpal and Shail Jain issued the directive on September 8 while hearing petitions from individuals whose personal identification documents were misused to register fraudulent GST accounts. The court's order came after reviewing alarming statistics on the scale of GST registration fraud in the country.
Parliamentary disclosures cited by the bench revealed that during 2023-24, authorities detected 2,800 fraudulent GST registrations facilitating Rs 15,085 crore in tax evasion. In the current fiscal year through 2024-25, the problem has persisted with 1,654 additional fraudulent registrations uncovering Rs 13,109 crore in tax evasion attempts.
The court noted that while tax authorities had previously indicated plans to implement mandatory biometric verification through Aadhaar for GST registration, the measure had not been operationalized. This delay allowed criminals to continue exploiting the system by using stolen or dormant PAN and Aadhaar credentials to establish shell entities for tax evasion purposes.
The high court's intervention seeks to close a critical vulnerability in the GST registration framework by making biometric authentication a non-negotiable requirement. The directive underscores mounting judicial concern over the revenue loss and systemic fraud enabled by inadequate verification protocols in India's indirect tax administration.