At a meeting with senior officials, the minister instructed that the GST registration process may be further strengthened using technology to curb entry of such fake entities in GST ecosystem, the minister's office said in a social media post.

"The finance minister called for a nation-wide campaign to explain the objectives of the special drive to weed out fake entities," the minister's office said. The meeting was held on Friday and was attended by revenue secretary Sanjay Malhotra and Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) chairperson Vivek Johri.

Central and state GST authorities are currently on a drive to detect fake entities that pass on bogus tax credits without underlying supply of goods or services. So far, over 11,000 such entities have been detected in the ongoing drive. At present, CBIC is using one time password-based verification of Aadhar at the time of registration in high-risk cases.

The increased level of data collection and reporting requirements at the level of business-to-business transactions have helped the GST authorities to scale up revenue collections in recent months. In April, Central and state governments had collected a record ₹1.87 trillion in GST revenue.