The Central Excise is under the administrative control of the Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC), which comes under the Department of Revenue, Ministry of Finance. For administrative control of the Excise Department, the country is divided into Zones headed by a Chief Commissioner of Central Excise and the Zones are further divided into Commissionerates and are headed by a Commissioner of Central Excise. Divisions and Ranges are subsequent field formations of the department. Central Excise duty is an indirect tax levied on goods manufactured in India. CBEC entrusted NIC with the job of computerization of Central Excise Commissionerates (CECs) and Divisions all over India in the year 1991. NIC took up the job and designed, developed and implemented various modules one after another. Various modules developed and running currently are:
| System for Excise Revenue Monitoring: SERMON For Compilation of Central Excise Tax and its monitoring, the Excise Computerisation Divison of NIC has developed a software package called SERMON. Currently the upgraded version of SERMON 5i is in use under Linux platform with Oracle 9i as back end and JAVA as front end.
| System for Allotment of Central Excise Registration Number: SACER This package registers all the Manufacturers and allots a unique 15-digit code on the basis of PAN code of Income Tax Department. A huge database of all Manufacturers and Dealers in India is available on Central Server and any authorized user can access this information. Multiple units owned by the same Manufacturer can be tracked irrespective of geographical location even if they have not disclosed it.
| Revenue Accounting System: RevAct. This package monitors the revenue receipts paid through TR6 challan in public sector banks by the Manufacturers. To process all these challans and to ensure proper revenue receipt accounting, the RevAct package has been developed and implemented at all commissionerates in India. Photo Caption: Central Excise computerization software being demonstrated by the NIC Team at ELITEX 2005
| Revenue Reconciliation: RevCon RevCon is used in the office of the Chief Accounts Officer (CAO) of the Central Excise Commissionerate to validate the data related to the original copy of TR-6 challan received from RevAct package with the data of duplicate TR-6 challan received from Range office using SERMON package.
| System for Allotment of PAN based Service Tax Payer Code: SAPS This package registers all service taxpayers in India and also allots a unique identification number as per the CBEC policy. In this Package a huge database is available of all service providers in India.
| Service Tax Return Monitoring System: STREMS CBEC can monitor the service tax collection for any particular Commissionerate and for any specified period. The software has a facility to calculate to know the tax collected on a particular category of service. Software is tuned to take care of increasing service tax categories as per Government policies.
| E-filing of Service Tax Returns: e-STAX e-STAX (e-filing of Service Tax Return) has been designed and developed for electronic filing of service tax returns ( ST-3) by the assessees through the internet. This will help the Department in monitoring the revenue generated through Service Tax. Data can be directly fed by the assessee, which saves time.
| Provisional Assessment Monitoring System: PAMS When there is a disagreement between the assessee and the CBEC officials on the amount of duty, then the assessment is done provisionally. To monitor all such cases and to keep track of the amount blocked because of Provisional Assessment, a software package is developed called Provisional Assessment Monitoring Systems or PAMS.
| Electronic Departmental Communication System: e-decs e-decs is a database oriented structured electronic communication system. The e-decs is a closed communication system and only the users of e-decs can exchange messages to each other. Each message generates a unique identification number (message id) for future reference. The users can recall the message by giving this message id. It has facility to send a message to individual user or user class. Only one copy of the message resides in the server even though message is addressed to many users. More details are available on the following websites: • http://sermon.nic.in • http://exciseandservicetax.nic.in
| Cyber Revenue Realisation Summary: CRRS The CBEC gets tentative revenue details from its CECs to monitor the revenue targets. This information was being received through fax or by telephone, which are prone to data errors and incomplete information. To overcome this problem NIC has developed the above web-based package for capturing data on the central server.
| All India Sermon Database The excise return data is stored at central server and is available on 24x7 basis. Several user groups have been formed to view the data from the Range-Division-Commissionerate-Zone to all India level. At present permissions are given to the users to view their jurisdiction data only.
| E-filing of Central Excise Returns. The CBEC has decided to receive the excise documents electronically using the Internet. As on today, the assessees file their excise returns manually to the concerned Range offices and subsequently, the department enters these returns into the system using the SERMON software. This process is prone to delays and data errors. A new, web enabled software ‘e-filing of Excise Returns’ has been developed and released for making the process fool proof.
| Capturing of Excise Return Data of Top Revenue Paying Assessees: The CBEC has felt that, the data pertaining to the major assessees who pays duty of more than rupees one crore, should be captured on the central server for effective and immediate revenue analysis. For this purpose, the electronic filing software has been enhanced, so that each division can directly do the data entry of Returns of top revenue paying assessee, onto the central server. Along with this an exhaustive MIS module was incorporated for revenue analysis purpose. The main features are: • Facility for the departmental officers to do data entry using e-filing software • Exhaustive MIS • Revenue explorer for drill down reports • Revenue trend analysis • Drilling down to identify the assessees with abnormal trend of revenue • Defaulters list • Facility to download the data and integrate with the offline version of the software
For details, please mail to cexffrig@excise.nic.in