GST officers have been armed with real-time data of commercial vehicle movement on highways with the integration of the e-way bill (EWB) system with FasTag and RFID, a move which will help in live vigilance of such vehicles and check GST evasion. Additional features have been added to the e-way bill mobile application of tax officers, which will provide them real-time tracking details of e-way bill and vehicle to help them nab tax evaders who are misusing the e-way bill system.

Under the goods and services tax (GST) regime, e-way bills have been made mandatory for inter-state transportation of goods valued over Rs 50,000 from April 2018. However, gold is exempted. In the electronic way (e-way) bill system, businesses and transporters have to produce before a GST inspector the e-way bill, if asked.

On average 25 lakh goods vehicle movements from more than 800 tolls are reported on a daily basis to the e-way bill system. The integration of e-way bill, RFID and FasTag will enable tax officers to undertake live vigilance in respect of e-way bill compliances by businesses and will aid in preventing revenue leakage by real-time identification of cases of recycling of EWBs, non-generation of EWBs. Taxmen can now access reports on vehicles that have passed the selected tolls without e-way bills in the past few minutes. Also, the vehicles carrying critical commodities specific to the state and have passed the selected toll can be viewed. Any suspicious vehicles and vehicles of EWBs generated by suspicious taxpayer GSTINs, that have passed the selected toll on a near real-time basis, can also be viewed in this report.