Confusing bill of entry declaration causing disruption in excise’ work: Vimalanathan

Sairaj Iyer

Data insufficiency in declarations made on the bill of entry records (BoE) is eating into the excise department’ time, thereby causing disruption in the facilitation of requests. “People are apprehensive about sharing information with the department. But then, doing so would only help the department facilitate work better,” said SK Vimalanathan, the Commissioner of Central Excise for Thane Zone-1.

He was replying to a question on data governance. He said the current spate of data governance is incomparable when compared to the standards suggested by WTO. International standards such as WTO’ offer complete automation of processes, which could further help the department save time and delay in the facilitation of excise’ requests. “In fact, I have analysed some data, and have found some import data in French and German languages in the data column. I have also found about 100 different noise words within the description column. If you declare the details properly either in GST, Excise, or Customs, then these departments can better automate processes and serve you better,” he mooted.

The Commissioner was invited to speak at Assocham’s post-budget-analysis seminar at Mumbai but did not touch upon GST or excise related pointers from the budget, as he believed that they (budgets) did not impact indirect taxation to a large extent. He also denied any delays in the implementation of GST while responding to a question from the audience.

GST, according to him is “on-time” and the concerns have “already been sorted out”. He was referring to concerns appearing in the news reports over speculations owing to differences in roles played between the numbers of assesses, state and the Centre. He explained, “Below 1.5 crore assessment the revenue share is 10% for the Center and 90% for the State. But above 1.5 crores it is in the ratio of 50-50. The department officers, who were administering service tax for the past several years, were concerned about GST impacting the ease of doing business since the ownership will have to be given to the other group. But GST has no issue as such, and is going on time.”