Withdrawing Cenvat Credit and monthly payment facility – Super-fast Board
Give the babu a discretion to do good; he will never use it for fear of Audit/CBI/Vigilance and may be for hundred good reasons. Give him a whip and he will start cracking it immediately. Concepts like natural justice, fair play, equity were followed by an alien government that was ruling us for well over two centuries. But the brown sahibs don’t have any respect for their brown subjects. When the Tatas acquired Corus, somebody remarked, “say it in Corus; India’s Standard is no longer Poor”, “Standards and Poor” should note. But the government still looks at the industry as thieves!
Remember the draconian and useless Notification No. 32/2006 - Central Excise (N.T.) dated 30th December 2006 by which the Central Excise department can impose physical control, deny the use of Cenvat credit and monthly payment of duty, if somebody had a doubt that the assessee had evaded duty. It was only on 19th January 2007, by the first notification of the year, Notification No. 1/2007 –CENT, that Board notified the Member, CBEC as the officer competent to issue the order withdrawing the facilities and within a fortnight, the first order is issued. Super speed work by any standards! The whole country would be better off if the department is equally fast in giving refunds and obeying court orders.
A spokesperson of the CBEC informed reporters on Friday that the department has issued its first order against three firms-- Shriram Tubes, TahaWire and Nissan Copper Ltd, involved in duty evasion of Rs 10 crore. She said that the department has withdrawn the facility of payment of excise duty on monthly basis and utilisation of CENVAT credit to pay central excise duty for these firms for three months. She also said that there was no appeal against the order. Maybe the government does not recognize the existence of High Courts in this country which are vested with writ jurisdiction to protect the citizens from over-governance.
Nobody would support an evader, but an evader is not one who the department assumes is an evader. You have laws in this country to punish evaders with huge penalties and imprisonment; you don’t need to resort to arm-twisting tactics just to extract a few more rupees. While we advance into the hi-tech age, we still have these barbarian laws. While the head is in the 22nd century, the tail is in the 16th century. All the assessees who don’t help the Commissioners reach their unrealistic targets, will have to face the same fate!