Government of India
Ministry of Finance
Department of Revenue
Central Board of Indirect Taxes & Customs
North Block, New Delhi-110001
Tel. No.: +91-11-23092849, Fax : +91-11-23092890
E-mail : vivekjohri.irs@gov.in
31st January, 2022
Chairman
DO No. 09/CH(IC)/2021
The week gone by was special. We celebrated the 73rd Republic Day as well as the International Customs Day. On the occasion, Appreciation Certificates and Medals for Specially Distinguished Record of Service were awarded to 29 officers. The investiture ceremony for conferring the awards on the officers will be held subsequently. Further, 19 officers of the Department along with a representative of a private logistics firm were awarded the WCO Certificate of Merit. Heartiest congratulations to all the winners.
While such occasions do call for celebrations and rightly so, perhaps we all would do well to take a moment to step back and introspect about our processes and how we can make the leap from being ‘good’ to being ‘great’. The giant strides we have made in not only liberalizing our legal and procedural framework for customs but also in developing a comprehensive IT platform for running our business processes, is commendable. Apart from policy makers, officers in DG (Systems) and DG (ARM) have worked tirelessly behind the scenes to make this happen.
For the gains from this transformation to be fully harvested, especially from the point of view of the trade and other stakeholders, we need to focus more acutely on improving our service delivery to our stakeholders leveraging this technology and the rich data it puts at our disposal. This can happen only if each one of us, regardless of our level or rank, is conscious of our responsibility and accountability. This will require collective effort to encourage constant knowledge and skills update; reasonable application of law and procedure and willingness to guide or hand-hold importers/exporters as also to solve their problems.
Moving on, the Union Budget will be presented tomorrow. I would urge all of you to familiarize yourselves with the Budget announcements, the proposed amendments and relevant notifications. We need to proactively engage with all our stakeholders over the next week or two, to explain these changes to them, clarify their doubts/queries and obtain feedback. Field formations should plan suitable outreach programmes for this purpose.
I am happy to share that the latest edition of the Departmental Directory, Sampark 2022 was released on the 27th of January. In keeping with the theme of Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav, the lives and contributions of Unsung Heroes of our freedom struggle have been celebrated through the pages of this publication. My congratulations to the DG, Directorate General of Taxpayer Services (DGTS) and his team for their dedication and painstaking efforts despite challenges posed by the latest wave of the Pandemic.
On the Anti-Evasion front, the Directorate of Goods and Service Tax Intelligence (DGGI), Meerut Zonal Unit, busted a syndicate involved in creating and controlling fake firms and issuing of bills by these fake firms without supply of any Goods or Services and encashment of GST refund. The investigation involved in-depth analysis of the network and devices used by the syndicate. Preliminary investigations have revealed more than 275 fictitious firms with the total value of the invoices issued being in excess of Rs 3,100 Crore and the total GST evaded estimated to be about Rs. 362 Crore.
On behalf of the Board and on my personal behalf, best wishes to Shri Himanshu Gupta, an officer of the 1987 Batch of the Indian Revenue Service who retires today.. His erudition and out-of-the-box search for solutions has been extremely beneficial to NACIN as an institution. I congratulate him on completing a successful career and thank him for his invaluable contribution to the service. We wish him the very best in all his future endeavors.
As the financial year draws to a close, I am sure that field formations would be firing on all cylinders to shore up revenue collections in these last two months. As we have in the past, we need to remain vigilant and agile to ensure that revenue collections maintain buoyant trend of recent months.
Till next week!
Yours Sincerely,
(Vivek Johri)
All Officers and Staff of Central Board of Indirect Taxes 86 Customs
