Customs - E-payment Mandatory Soon - But is Customs EDI Ready?
Board has decided to make e-payment of duty mandatory for the importers paying an amount of Rupees one lakh or more per transaction. Additionally, for Accredited Clients under the Customs Accredited Client Programme irrespective of any amount of duty, the Customs duty will have to be paid through E- payment mode only. The date from which the E- payment will be made mandatory will be notified separately.
DG (Systems) has prepared instructions outlining the procedure for electronic payments. Board wants importers, trade and industry to be provided all assistance so as to help them in adopting the new procedure.
All fine, but is the Indian Customs EDI System (ICES 1.5) ready? Even now the ICES is not able to handle all the Bills of Entry and the system is terribly slow and importers are waiting in queue every day to get their documents through the snail pace of India's Customs electronic bungling. After spending Crores of rupees, the Indian Customs is stuck with a third rate system and importers are the victims. It is learnt that in some Customs stations, they have imposed a quota system for the number of documents that an importer can file, because always there is a long waiting list. Recently in a major city, the e-payment system crashed and nobody had a clue as to what could be done.
The Systems in the CBEC is in a terrible mess and needs to be urgently repaired before the whole system crashes and collection of duties would be just impossible.
A new DG, Systems is taking charge today; we wish her all the best and hope that she would be able to clean up the System.
CBEC Circular No. 33/2011-Cus, Dated: July 29, 2011