Government of India
Ministry of Finance
Department of Revenue
Central Board of Indirect Taxes & Customs
North Block, New Delhi-110 001
Tel. : +91-11-23092849, Fax : +91-11-23092890
E-mail : vivekjohri.irs@gov.in
17th October, 2022
Chairman
DO No. 46/CH(IC)/2022
We live in the age of social media – from news about the world to news about our friends it’s all happening on social media. The one entity at the center of it all is – Twitter. Is it a social media network, a microblogging site or an information network. It is hard to define and perhaps harder to avoid!
The one constant in the Twitter growth story has been how the vast majority of users interact with the service via third party software. Twitter is recognized for having one of the most open and powerful developer Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which has helped create a whole set of applications that integrate with Twitter and have increased its applications manifold. The Twitter story is an excellent example of how individual efforts and mutual collaboration on the back on an enabling environment can lead to rapid growth and enhanced productivity for an organization.
Last week, continuing our emphasis on improving our physical infrastructure, an office building & Guest House for the Udupi Central Excise & Central Tax Division was inaugurated. A revamped and updated Customs Chemical Laboratory was also inaugurated at Mangaluru. Equipped with the latest infrastructure for dry-testing of chemcials, the laboratory has been designed especially for analysis of commodities such as coal and vegetable oils.
During my visit I also had the opportunity to inspect our fleet of boats at Mangaluru Customs and to interact with the specialized cadre of officers who not only keep the assets in good working order but also actively patrol the coastline with our preventive teams.
Heartiest Congratulations to Principal Chief Commissioner, Central Goods & Service Tax (CGST), Bengaluru Zone and her team as well as Director, Central Revenues Control Laboratories and his team for their initiative and hard work in bringing these projects to fruition.
It has been a busy week on the anti-evasion front. CGST, Customs & Central Excise, Bhopal Zone reported having detected a case relating to an assesse engaged in the supply of exempted as well as taxable goods while not reversing the proportionate Input Tax Credits (ITC). It is estimated that the extent of evasion would exceed Rs. 200 Crores, Out of this an amount of Rs. 50 Crores was reversed by the assesse.
On the anti-smuggling front, the week gone by also saw officers of the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), Ahmedabad Zonal Unit seize over 85,50,000 sticks of foreign brand cigarettes, estimated to be valued at over Rs. 17 Crores attempted to be smuggled through the Mundra port.
Further, officers of Customs (Preventive) Commissionerate, Vijayawada also detected a consignment of over 7,32,000 smuggled foreign brand cigarette sticks being transported through the Railway Parcel Service. In addition to the evasion of duties, such smuggled cigarettes also do not comply with the mandatory pictorial and health warnings on the packaging and are thus twice as egregious. Compliments to the officers for their excellent detections.
Before I sign off for the week, I would like to share about two articles written by Departmental officers which have been published by two multi-lateral organizations. The first is a paper titled, ‘Measuring Trade Facilitation: Evidence from India’, written by Sh. Vijay Singh Chauhan & Ms. Sruti Vijayakumar and circulated by the World Trade Organization (WTO) amongst its members. The article presents a comprehensive review of various publicly available studies for the period since 2015 relating to performance measurement of the ecosystem that handles the cross-border movement of goods, in so far as they relate to India. These studies cover metrics such as the Logistics Performance Index; EoDB ranking and our Time Release Studies.
The other is an article titled, ‘Indian Customs enhances its Customs Offence Management System’ by Sh. Rajesh Pandey Sh. Kaushik Thinnaneri Ganesan. The article presents the enhancements made to the National Customs Offence Management System – “DIGIT”, which is used for collecting and managing data related to all Customs offences detected in India. This article has appeared in the WCOnews (Issue 03/2022, No. 99).
Such well-researched & cogently articulated articles/papers, whether published locally or abroad, are an effective means of showcasing the tremendous amount of work towards improving our systems & procedures to our stakeholders. I whole heartedly congratulate the authors for making time to do this and encourage others to draw inspiration from their work.
Till next week!
Yours Sincerely,
(Vivek Johri)
All Officers and Staff of Central Board of Indirect Taxes & Customs
