1. Lau Zhen Zhou , the sole shareholder and director of Safety Marine Management Pte Ltd, was convicted of 5 charges of assisting SMM to evade a total of about $1.1 million in Goods and Services Tax (GST) and one charge of providing falsified documents during his audit with the intent to evade the aforesaid GST.
2. He made false entries in 5 of SMM’s GST returns. In addition, Lau gave a false answer with fabricated documents in response to queries by IRAS auditors. For all his offences, Lau was sentenced to 3 years and 8 months’ of imprisonment and ordered to pay a total of $3,213,828.09 in penalties
3. It is a serious offence to wilfully submit false GST returns by overstating any input tax, understating any output tax or including fictitious claims. Offenders may face a penalty of three times the amount of tax undercharged, in addition to a fine not exceeding $10,000 and/or imprisonment for a term not exceeding 7 years.
4. It is important for you to support your GST output and input tax entries. This can be in the form of tax invoices, delivery orders, emails, airway bills, shipping documents, etc.
5. Furthermore, this supporting documents must be properly issued according to GST Act and regulations. For example, tax invoices issued to your customers must have your company’s name and GST registration number.
6. For GST input tax claims, the supplier’s tax invoice issued to you must be in your company’s full name (not your name). You also need to make sure that the supplier is a GST registered company or else IRAS will not refund you. You can check in IRAS’ website for this.
7. Last but not least, please file your GST returns to IRAS by the due date to avoid any late filing penalty.
8. Therefore, invest in a good and reputable accounting firm like us. PL Biz have the knowledge and experience of more than 15 years in GST filings to IRAS. We make sure you stay in the right side of the law or else you will end up like Lau Zhen Zhou.
