The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has approved ‘Project SAKSHAM’.
The Project SAKSHAM is a New Indirect Tax Network (Systems Integration) of the Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC).
It seeks to bolster the information technology network for the new Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime that the Union Government intends to roll out from 1st April 2017.
The Project SAKSHAM will help in
- Integration of CBEC IT systems with the Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN).
- Extension of Indian Customs Single Window Interface for Facilitating Trade (SWIFT)
- Other taxpayer-friendly initiatives under Digital India and Ease of Doing Business of CBEC.
Background
- With the implementation of GST, the Union government expects the number of taxpayers under indirect tax laws to increase to about 65 lakh from the current 36 lakh.
- CBEC’s IT systems need to integrate with the GSTN for processing of registration, payment and returns data sent by GSTN systems to CBEC.
- It will also act as a front-end for other modules like audit, appeal and investigation. However, there is no overlap in the GST-related systems of GSTN and CBEC.
- IT infrastructure is also required for continuation of CBEC’s e-services in customs, central excise and service tax, implementation of taxpayer services, extension of SWIFT initiative and integration with government initiatives such as e-Taal, e-Nivesh and e-Sign.