Cabinet clears Rs 2,256 -crore project for GST integration

Tribune News Service

The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) today approved a Rs 2,256 crore IT project “Saksham” of the Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC), designed to integrate CBEC systems with the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Network before the rollout in April next year.

The total project cost involved is Rs 2,256 crore which will be incurred over a period of seven years. The project will help in implementation of 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 the CBEC.

An official statement said the implementation strategy for the project would be to ensure readiness of the CBEC’s IT framework by April 1, 2017, when GST is to be introduced. 

The CBEC’s IT systems need to integrate with the GST Network (GSTN) for processing of registration, payment and returns data sent by GSTN systems to the CBEC, as well as act as a front-end for other modules such as audit, appeal and investigation. There is no overlap in the GST-related systems of the CBEC and the GSTN, the statement said.

This IT infrastructure is also urgently required for continuation of the CBEC’s e-services in customs, central excise and service tax, implementation of taxpayer services such as scanned document upload facility, extension of SWIFT initiative and integration with government initiatives such as e-nivesh, e-taal, e-sign.

The introduction of GST will result in a several-fold increase in the number of taxpayer and resultant document load on the system. The 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.