Punjab govt plans to give ‘lucky’ consumers rewards up to ₹50k

The Punjab government is gearing up to roll out a new scheme, ‘Bill Leyao, Inaam Pao’ (Bring a bill, Get a reward), under which ‘lucky customers’ can receive rewards up to ₹50,000 by submitting receipts of their purchases to the taxation department.

The main objective of this scheme is to encourage people to insist on receipts while making purchases and to reduce theft of goods and services tax (GST) by unscrupulous traders and shopkeepers. As per the taxation department’s plan, 10 participants from each of the 29 “taxation districts” will be rewarded every month.

The department plans to distribute rewards worth approximately ₹3 crore annually based on a draw to those who submit ‘genuine’ receipts of purchases. “Anyone who has a receipt for a purchase worth ₹200 or more will be eligible to get registered, fill in his or her details and submit the receipt online to participate in the draw. Successful participants will receive a reward of five times the amount mentioned in the receipt with a maximum limit of ₹50,000. If a participant has, for instance, made a purchase worth ₹200 and gets selected in the draw, he or she will get ₹1000 as a reward,” said an official privy to details of the scheme on condition of anonymity.

A mobile application has already been developed for registration and submission of receipts and every invoice will be tallied by the staff of the taxation department with the filings to see if it is genuine or fake. “The programme is more or less ready to be rolled out in the next threefour weeks,” the official quoted above said. When contacted, taxation commissioner Kamal Kishor Yadav said the scheme would be as per the announcement made by the finance minister Harpal Singh Cheema in his budget speech. Cheema announced the scheme while presenting the state budget for the financial year 2023-24 in the Punjab Vidhan Sabha on March 10. The scheme was proposed to formalise financial transactions, educate the customers and mop up GST. “Anybody who purchases anything, suppose he buys a mobile and gets a bill from a shopkeeper and gets that bill registered at a government portal. If that bill is found to be fake and the GST has not been paid on it, action will be taken against the seller,” Cheema had told the reporters.

Punjab has projected a growth of 21% in its GST collection in the budget estimates for the financial year 2023-24, taking it to ₹23,000 crore from 2022-23 revised estimates (RE) of ₹19,000. In the previous fiscal, the state government reported a 16.6% increase in GST revenue and is counting on stricter monitoring and initiatives, such as the reward scheme, for better tax compliance to achieve the targeted growth in the current year.