The Hindu : Business : Centre plans ‘high-impact audit’ of select sectors

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Thursday, Jul 26, 2007
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Centre plans ‘high-impact audit’ of select sectors

Special Correspondent

Exercise aimed at curbing excise evasion

NEW DELHI: The Centre on Tuesday decided to undertake ‘high-impact audit’ of select industries such as steel, chewing tobacco and furnace oil to curb excise duty evasion as part of an overall exercise to plug revenue leakages.

“There are some concerns about excise... It is one tax where I think there is high degree of evasion,” Finance Minister P. Chidambaram told newspersons here after inaugurating a two-day annual conference of chief commissioners and director generals of Central excise and customs. Terming this as one of the measures decided by the Government to curb excise evasion, he said: “The high-impact audit must cover assessees, products or sectors which are prone to tax evasion”. Chidambaram said.

In this regard, the Central Board of Excise and Customs Chairman, S. K. Singhal, disclosed that the Department had found that a large number of units in sectors such as steel, furnace oil and ‘paan masala’ were indulging in excise evasion.

The audit of these sectors to check the revenue leakage, therefore, would be based on certain internal risk parameters, he said. Mr. Chidambaram noted that the Department would also begin to make public the names of those assessees against whom deterrent steps are taken for indulging in duty evasion. He claimed that as a rule, excise collections should follow the same trend as that of the mop-up through VAT and so, to detect non-disclosures, the authorities have been told to share with states the data on specific products, industries and cities.

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