With three prominent film personalities already under the scanner for service tax evasion, the department has proclaimed that they are going to be much more stringent about these tax laws. Sunny Deol is already on the verge of an arrest considering the fact that the actor turned producer has a payment of Rs. 20 lakh due to the Service Tax Department and the department will send a show-cause in the next two days.

Recently other filmmakers who were booked for similar charges were Sameer Karnik for evading Rs. 1.88 crore, Anurag Kashyap for evading Rs. 70 lakh and Tigmanshu Dhulia for evading Rs. 47 lakh. Mumbai Service Tax commissioner R. Sekar announced that 132 notices have been sent to Film and TV Productions houses and this includes bigwigs like Eros International, Big Cinemas/Big Entertainment, Anil Kapoor Films Ltd, Red Eye and Phantom etc. He also revealed that he has come across production houses which do not pay service tax at all.

However, to find a solution for this legal controversy, Film and Television Producers Guild of India joined hands with Service Tax Department and in a meeting, the CEO of the Guild Kulmeet Kakkar decided to write to the members asking them to co-operate with the Tax Department. For cases where the filmmakers were unable to pay taxes because of certain reasons, a VCS (Voluntary Compliance Scheme) was designed by the department to help the industry. Sameer Karnik has applied for VCS.