How biryani billing trail exposed multi-crore tax scam; Rs 70,000 crore sales hidden

What began as a simple I-T review of biryani restaurant bills turned into a sweeping hunt for Rs 70,000 crore in suppressed sales buried across the country.

It began quietly late last year, but the scale it exposed was staggering. A routine visit by officers from the Income Tax (I-T) Department to a few popular biryani restaurants in Hyderabad would eventually point to around Rs 70,000 crore in concealed turnover across the country.

At the time, nothing looked unusual. Officers walked in for basic checks. Kitchens were busy, customers were eating, and the billing counters were operating as usual.

Then something did not add up. The number of diners inside the restaurant was far higher than the figures showing on the billing system.

At first, the officers thought it was a local trick. Then they discovered that all these restaurants were using the same billing software. That was the moment the investigation stopped being routine.

When officials traced the deletion pattern back to the software provider’s backend in Ahmedabad, they unlocked nearly sixty terabytes of stored billing information from more than one lakh restaurants across India.

A small mismatch at a biryani joint had suddenly turned into a nationwide data trail.