“The company has been found evading value added tax (VAT), excise duty and income tax. The volume of its tax evasion is estimated to run into millions of rupee,” said DRI Director General Bharat Subedi. [break]
He told Republica that the actual assessment of tax evasion will be known only after the investigation officials complete the study of the books of accounts and transactions recorded in its computers.
The teams of DRI had raided all the outlets of Hot Breads at around 4:15 pm. The teams seized all its documents and computers.
Hot Breads is promoted by Shreedhar Sharma Pandey. Its head office is located in Naxal and outlets are in places like New Baneshwar, Patan and Durbar Marg, among others.
However, despite being promoted by Pandey, DRI officials said the company was found to have used the names of different persons at different outlets to evade the taxes.
“For taxation purpose, Pandey was found to have named different outlets under the name of different family members. Apparently, he did this to escape registration under VAT,” said Subedi.
Going by the existing law, all firms having annual turnover of Rs 2 million or more needs to be registered with VAT. “Transactions of all outlets of Hot Breads crosses over Rs 100 million,” said Subedi, disclosing that daily transactions of some of the outlets easily exceed Rs 150,000 each.
According to the officials, DRI swung into against Hot Breads based on a tip off.
“We found that only some of its outlets were issuing VAT receipts, meaning it has been evading VAT,” said Subedi.
Some of the outlets were also found trading on foreign liquor without due license, he added.
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