Bangalore: Financial Intelligence Unit (FUI) is to work with The Directorate General of Central Excise Intelligence (DGCEI) to go after 65,000 plus non-filers of service tax returns, who have managed to escape the scrutiny of the government so far, reports Shruti Srivastava from The Indian Express.

The FUI is an agency which gathers and analyzes the information about all the suspicious financial transaction. The DGCEI is a nodal agency which detects all the cases of evasion of excise duty and service tax. This agency is tasked with developing intelligence and gathers information by issuing modus operandi and alerts circulars to appraise field formation of the latest trends in duty evasion. 

However, roping in the FIU to go after evaders shows the graveness of the situation of evasion in the excise, customs and service taxes.

The Finance Minister of India, P.Chidambaram had asked the DGCEI to work towards making available some unique identifier to track evaders of service tax and central excise duty, and had also questioned the DGCEI as to why PAN was not mandatory for registration under excise and customs department.

The FIU, while running the data through the database, found that absence of PAN-like unique identifier has ensured that these defaulters leave no trail.