The Central Crime Station (CCS) police of Hyderabad has booked a case against former Telangana chief secretary Somesh Kumar and two senior officers of Commercial Taxes Department and professor of IIT, Hyderabad allegedly for IGST violation.
The tax evasion scam is said to be worth more than Rs 1000 crore. The complaint was lodged by K Ravi Kanuri, Joint Commissioner of Commercial Taxes (CT) against the former chief secretary and the others for providing access of commercial tax department’s proprietary data to a third-party IP, masking tax payers’ data and ignoring IGST discrepancies which led to revenue losses.
While SV Kasi Visweswara Rao, Additional Commissioner and A Siva Rama Prasad, Deputy Commissioner are the first two accused, the assistant professor from IIT (Hyderabad) is the third accused in the case followed by Plianto Technologies while the former chief secretary was designated as the fifth accused in the case.
IIT Hyderabad was engaged as a service provider by the CT department to perform analytics and provide discrepancy reports based on the returns filed by the taxpayers registered in Telangana. The accused were participants of an active WhatsApp group that was allegedly “supervised” by Somesh Kumar. A forensic audit revealed “systematic exclusion of certain cases” when notices were generated for discrepancy.
After preliminary verification so far, 11 cases which were “masked” IIT-H have been revealed with evasion of more than Rs 400 crore. This includes the case of Telangana State Beverages Corporation Limited. Evasions of another Rs1000 crore through fraudulent cases were also detected in Telangana.
The scam was unearthed when a desk audit of two companies Big Leap Technologies and Solutions Private Limited showed basic discrepancies but the reports generated through the Scrutiny Module developed by IIT-H did not reveal the same. When the department inquired, it revealed changes made in the software which were not documented and changes in applications following oral instructions from the then special chief secretary (Revenue) Somesh Kumar and the two senior officers of Commercial Taxes department. According to the complaint, the IGST discrepancies were not revealed by the software leading to loss of revenue. When an explanation was sought from the two accused officers of the CT department, it was reported that the operations were being run under the name and banner of Plianto Technologies from the premises of IIT-H.
An audit of the agreement between IIT-H and CT department revealed further lack of clarity including that the control of data was with IIT-H and hence “there is every scope for modification of data to conveniently favour any firm.” It was also revealed that assistant professor Sobhan Babu got instructions through a WhatsApp group “Special initiatives” and the participants included Somesh Kumar and two senior officials of CT department.
Kumar was the Chief Secretary during the BRS regime and had been in charge of land revenue for quite some time. Although allotted to AP during bifurcation, he managed to stay back in Telangana due to favourable CAT order which was turned over by the High Court and he was forced to join in AP. He took early VRS and was later seen accompanying BRS chief K Chandrasekhar Rao during various tours.