Bakeries spared from excise onslaught
Immediately after the budget a few former colleagues called up. Pastry and biscuits are now not exempted and they are not even covered under the SSI exemption. So does every street corner bakery become a factory liable to pay excise duty? Should we attack? One bright lady inspector remarked, “the bakery shops may not be manufacturing cakes and biscuits, they may be only selling them; so we should go to the places where they are baked and not the shops where they are sold”. But she had a brighter solution. “the icing on the cake amounts to manufacture and normally the icing is done in the shop; so we can collect duty from the shops”. Even we in TIOL spent hours in compiling a list of items omitted from the SSI list. Mercifully before the excise sleuths landed up in these shops, Board gave a clarification that these are indeed included in the SSI notification. They clarified that instead of chapter 9 given in the list of goods eligible for SSI benefit, chapter 9 to 20 should be included.
Keeping with the latest ostrich tendency, Board has given these clarifications in a private letter addressed to Chief Commissioners and Commissioners while the notes and notifications are widely published. It took all our resources to get a copy of the corrigendum. Why is it that the Board commits blunders in public and rectifies them in private? Why couldn’t this corrigendum be given wide publicity? If they had any sense of responsibility, they should have given full page ads in newspapers informing the people about this corrigendum. When they give daily ads about paying duty, can’t they publicize important corrections? In any case we are ready to do it free, but somehow the government is shy to share information.
Board’s F.No. dated 28th February 2006