Project Saksham, a new indirect tax network of the Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC), has been approved by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The total cost of the project is estimated to be Rs 2256 crore, which will be incurred over a period of seven years.

 

The project will help in implementation of Goods and Services Tax (GST), extension of the Indian Customs Single Window Interface for Facilitating Trade (SWIFT) and other taxpayer-friendly initiatives under Digital India and Ease of Doing Business of CBEC.

 

The implementation strategy for the project will be to ensure eadiness of CBEC's IT systems by April1, 2017. The upgrade of the IT systems will be carried out while keeping the existing Tax-payer services running.

 

All taxpayers, importers, exporters, dealers under various indirect tax laws administered by CBEC- presently about 36 lakh, are likely to go up to over 65 lakh after introduction of GST. CBEC’s current IT system was set up in 2008. It cannot cater to the increased load under GST without an immediate upgrade of its IT Infrastructure. Further, CBEC has implemented the Indian Customs Single Window Interface for Facilitating Trade (SWIFT) and is integrating other partner agencies involved in Customs clearance in order to make the process simple and fast. The Customs EDI system which is currently operational at about 140 locations in India might be extended to more locations with improved response time and better service delivery.

 

Taxpayers have to be given a facility for Upload of Digitally Signed Scanned Documents in order to reduce the physical interface with tax authorities and to increase the speed of clearance. CBEC also aims to introduce mobile services for taxpayers and departmental users to increase the outreach of its services.

 

This IT infrastructure will also help in the continuation of CBEC's e-Services in Customs, Central Excise and Service Tax, implementation of taxpayer services such as scanned document upload facility, extension of Indian Customs Single Window Interface for Facilitating Trade (SWIFT) initiative and integration with Government initiatives such as E-Nivesh, E-Taal, e-Sign.

 

CBEC's IT systems need to integrate with the Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN) for processing of registration, payment and returns data sent by GSTN systems to CBEC, as well as to act as a front-end for other modules like Audit, Appeal, Investigation. There will be no overlap in the GST-related systems of CBEC and GSTN.