Union Minister for Tourism and Culture G. Kishan Reddy has expressed serious concern at the role of the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad (IIT-H) in the massive GST returns scam unearthed by Telangana Commercial Taxes department running into over ₹1,000 crore.
Mr. Kishan Reddy, according to highly placed sources, taking cognisance of the story published in these columns on Tuesday, has dashed off a letter to the Union Minister for Education Dharmendra Pradhan urging him to look into the alleged role of certain officials of the IIT-H in the episode.
A clipping of the exclusive story reported by ‘The Hindu’ which exposed the GST returns scam was forwarded to the Union Education Minister for further action, they said. IIT-H had an agreement with the Telangana Commercial Taxes department to provide IT support but the data was not shared with the CT department making it accessible to select officials only.
The department has already ordered an enquiry into why the IIT-H official concerned did not report about the systematic fraud of tax evasion and did not mention about any deviations in its monthly report after bringing the issue to the notice of the institute director.
A glaring ‘shortcoming’ noticed by the CT officials during their inquiry was that certain fields of data was masked about the tax payers even as the IIT-H official confessed about following “oral instructions” from top bureaucrats in the previous regime to hide the key data input.
