EOUs can make monthly payment of duty – officers to scrutinise the self assessment
EOUs are at present required to pay duty consignment-wise, before each removal. Now they can follow the procedure under Rule 8, that is pay the duty by the 5th of the following month. A welcome relief indeed!
But there is bad news for the officers; they are now required to scrutinise the returns and self assessments and of course the assessee is required to make available to the proper officer all the documents required by him.
The assessment is required to be scrutinised in the manner prescribed by the Board. The good Board will eventually prescribe the procedure.
This is nothing new actually, but hardly known and followed. This is already there in Rule 12 and in respect of all other units, the returns are to be scrutinised by the Central Excise officers. And actually the Board had in CIRCULAR NO. 818/15/2005-CX, Dated : July 15, 2005 prescribed the manner of scrutiny.
As per this circular, scrutiny would be carried out in two stages viz. the 'scrutiny of return' and scrutiny of assessment. The preliminary scrutiny shall also involve checking and comparison of trends of payment of duty, production, clearance (for home consumption on payment of duty and under exemption and for exports), value, and CENVAT utilization to identify returns for detailed scrutiny. Have you heard of anyone doing all this?
Every six months, the ACs/DCs/JCs and Additional Commissioners are required to scrutinise the returns of assessees paying more than Rs. 5 Crores in PLA!
A survey made by us revealed that none of these officers do any scrutiny – of course some of them do sign on the returns after getting an oral certificate from the Superintendent that the return is “good” – some don't bother to even do that. Has any Commissioner ever checked whether his Additional Commissioners and Deputy Commissioners are scrutinising returns? The basic job of a Revenue officer is assessment and that sadly, is lacking in Central Excise and Service Tax.
Today we are carrying an article from a concerned Superintendent about assessment in Service Tax. See our Guest column.
Consequent to the “monthly payment facility”, the Form ER-2 return to be filed by the EOUs is amended.
Notification No. 23 and , Dated: May 23, 2008