Excise Dept raids Orbit Resorts over tax evasion

Kulwinder Sandhu

Tribune News Servie

Moga, October 12

The Excise and Taxation Department conducted raids on Orbit Resorts comprising a multiplex, hotel and restaurant in the district for alleged GST evasion and other irregularities.

A team of the department, led by Deputy Excise and Taxation Commissioner Harpinder Pal Singh Ghotra, conducted raids on the resorts over the past two days.

The Orbit Resorts are owned by local SAD leader Yogesh Goel and his close relative Sanjay Kumar, a resident of Mumbai. The department has issued a show-cause notice to Goel and his partners.

The team has taken into custody two main servers of their computer system and many record books pertaining to sales and services provided by the resorts.

A senior official of the department while confirming this to The Tribune said officials of the resorts were not maintaining proper computerised record of sales and services in the hotel and restaurant from which it was quite evident that GST was being evaded on a large scale.

“The data of computers has shown the records of sales and services for only one-day in the system, while the past records were being deliberately deleted on a daily basis, probably, to forge tax records,” said the official. The computer servers are being sent to a government laboratory for the recovery of previous data.

He said a special team of the department was keeping an eye on the resorts for the past two months. Online bookings of hotel rooms through ‘Book my Room’, ‘Yatra.com’, ‘Make my Trip’ and other agencies/portals were being monitored on a daily basis to verify the records of payments and confirmations, which would be matched with the GST deposited by them in the government treasury.

When contacted, Ashwani Goel, one of the co-founders of Orbit Resorts, said he no longer had any stake in the business after family division. His elder brother Yogesh Goel, who is also co-owner of the Orbit Resorts, could not be contacted.