New Delhi: The GST law is being violated by offshore entities offering online betting and gambling platforms to Indian residents through mobile apps and are working on ways to tackle such modes of tax evasion. As per the prescribed procedure, all offshore entities providing services in India are required to register as suppliers of OIDAR (Online Information Database Access and Retrieval) services under the Goods and Services Tax (GST) law.
Many offshore entities are providing platforms for online betting and gambling in the country but are not GST-registered and hence are not paying the required GST.
“Although several overseas educational bodies offering online courses in India are registered as OIDAR, the entities providing online gaming, betting ad gambling platforms are not registered under GST. We are pursuing such cases and hope to bring them under the GST net,” PTI reported quoting a source.
These online betting and gambling apps are available on Google Play Store for android phone users and App Store for iOS users and can be freely downloaded. According to the source, these companies are collecting funds and offering services in the country, they are liable to pay GST. However, as these entities do not have a permanent establishment or a physical presence in India, it is difficult to serve notices to them.
“Several of these companies frequently change their bank accounts maintained overseas and hence tracing them is a problem. We are trying to bring such platforms in the tax net,” the source told PTI.
The source said that once the MeiTY norms are operationalised, the GST intelligence wing will evolve its own mechanism to deal with the menace of tax evasion.
