The central excise and service commissionerate based in the city and has formed a list of 1,500 such defaulters and is now in the process of verifying the same.

A senior official from the commissionerate said, "We had a scheme running till December 31, 2013, where individuals voluntarily could declare their service tax without paying the penalty. Now since that is over, we have formed a list of those defaulters who did not even pay under this scheme. The IT department too will be informed and before the end of this financial year, we are hoping to recover the service tax."

Those from the commissionerate said that though they had formed a list of 1,500 defaulters and had sent notices to all of them but most of the notices have been received back. The officials added that they were now going in for physical verification following which the required action would be taken.

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Atul Handa, joint commissioner, Central Excise and Service Commissionerate said, "We are working on the defaulters and once the basic ground work is completed, we shall go ahead with the required action against the defaulters".

Meanwhile, among these 1,500 defaulters, there are about 120 such individuals, who have changed their business but haven't surrendered their registration numbers and thus their names would be struck off directly from the list.

Senior officials said that there were certain technical glitches and it is only after physical verification and help with IT department that a concrete list of the defaulters will be formed.

Meanwhile the department has scrutinised the applications received by it till December 31 under the service tax voluntary compliance encouragement scheme, 2013 (VCES), and says that there is misrepresentation of facts in several applications.

The department under the scheme has earned a tax amount of a total of `30 crores, against its target of `20 crores. Under the commissionerate, there falls entire city and certain parts of SAS Nagar and in all 200 applicants alone from the city had come forward to declare tax under the said scheme.