The Finance Minister, Mr Pranab Mukherjee, is hopeful that the Central Board of Excise and Customs would meet the indirect tax collection target for the current fiscal. Further efforts are required to ensure that the targeted collections are met, Mr Mukherjee said at an investiture ceremony organised today to hand over Presidential awards to customs and excise officials.
The Centre had budgeted the indirect tax collection target for 2011-12 at Rs 3.93 lakh crore. Mr Mukherjee said that the indirect tax collection figures up to January 2012 indicate that there have been some gains over the last year.
Total indirect tax collections in the first 10 months of the current fiscal stood at Rs 3.17 lakh crore, reflecting a 15 per cent increase over Rs 2.75 lakh crore garnered in the same period in the previous year.
On the excise front, collections up to January this fiscal stood at Rs 1,17,730 crore. The Centre's excise revenue has more than doubled over the last 10 years from Rs 68,282 crore in 2000-01 to Rs 1,37,427 crore in 2010-11. This accounts for 40 per cent of the total revenue from indirect taxes.
Reform measures
The Central Excise Department has been among the early stakeholders to pursue reforms as part of the liberalisation process. These reforms which began in 1994 and continued through the subsequent years brought about a strategic shift from the control based gate-pass system to invoice and record-based system.
The objective of these reforms was to repose a greater trust on assessees and introduce a number of trade facilitation measures in Central excise rules and procedures.
The system of compliance in Central excise was sought to be implemented mainly through audit and anti-evasion mechanism.
Mr Mukherjee said that these reforms have to be continued to their logical end, making compliance easy and cost effective.
Goods, service tax
On goods and services tax, the Finance Minister said that GST is expected to be a more efficient system of taxation and is likely to give a boost to the tax revenues of the Centre and the States.
GST will also remove barriers amongst States and convert the entire country into a common market. Once implemented, GST will bring about a paradigm shift in the arena of indirect taxation in the country, he said.
Speaking on the occasion, the CBEC Chairman, Mr S.K. Goel, expressed confidence that the Budget estimates on indirect tax collections will be completely met.
