Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Choudhary told Parliament that the government has recovered Rs 95.86 crore from 11 cryptocurrency exchanges including WazirX, CoinDCX and CoinSwitch Kuber, where tax authorities have recovered a total of Rs 81.54 crore in Goods and Services Tax (GST) evasion. is detected. ,
Choudhary, in a written reply to a question in Lok Sabha, said the amount recovered includes evaded GST along with interest and penalty.
According to Choudhary, the biggest theft was detected at Zanmai Labs, the parent company of Binance-owned exchange WazirX, worth Rs 40.51 crore, followed by CoinDCX at Rs 15.7 crore and Coinswitch Kubera at Rs 13.76 crore. Buy Ucoin, Unocoin, Flitpay, Zeb IT Services Pvt Ltd, Secure Bitcoin Traders Pvt Ltd, Geotas Technologies, Avalencan Innovation India Pvt Ltd (Zebpay), and Discidium Internet Labs were the remaining exchanges that Choudhary avoided GST.
Investigations by tax authorities on crypto exchanges for alleged tax evasion first came to light in January this year when the Central GST-Mumbai Zone disclosed that it had been accused of failing to pay indirect tax on commission earned by Zanmai Labs. . GST evasion of Rs 40.5 crore detected. In WazirX’s native token WRX. At that time, the company had said that it had no intention of avoiding GST and that “there was ambiguity in the interpretation of a component that led to a different calculation of GST payment”.
For example, some exchanges, such as WazirX, charge a commission on peer-to-peer crypto transactions and count it as revenue, while others, such as CoinSwitch Kuber, also act as brokers and provide users with Allows buying and selling of cryptocurrencies. , “There is a problem in calculating the exact tax amount because of the confusion over the tax applied to the different business models adopted by the cryptocurrency firms,” said a person from a crypto exchange.
Currently under the GST regime, there is no clear classification of cryptocurrencies and a GST of 18 per cent is levied only on services provided by crypto exchanges and classified as financial services.