Staff in Revenue Departments - Centre and State - Huge Difference

By Vijay Kumar

I made a quick study of the staff position of gazetted officers in the Customs, Central Excise and Service Tax department and the Commercial Taxes department of a large State. Both the Central Revenue and the State VAT collect about 22,000 crores of rupees as Revenue. The Commercial Taxes Department is headed by a part-time Commissioner, who is not even from the Department and he is assisted by a Spl. Commissioner, both of whom belong to the IAS. They work in this Department for two to three years. And they have just 4 Additional Commissioners and two JCs, 42 DCs, 73ACs and 288 CTOs. Compare this with the Central Excise, which is manned by one Principal Chief Commissioner, 4 Principal Commissioners, 15 Commissioners, 42 ADCs, 209 DCs and over 1500 Superintendent grade officers! (please see the Table below)

Does the Central Excise/Service Tax department really need so many officers when with one-third that strength, the VAT department is able to collect the same amount of tax? And they have more assessees than the Central Department and of course less litigation. More officers invariably mean more litigation and more harassment and less facilitation. The entire exercise is not for the benefit of the taxpayer or the Nation, but for giving promotions to a large number of officers who are frustrated that they are not getting their due promotion.

Anyway as so candidly agreed by the Chairman that there would be disruption of normal working - read total confusion!

Instead of this massive destructive exercise, they could have promoted all the officers to their next higher cadre and avoided this irreparable mess.