Export Duty on clearances to SEZ – CBEC, PLEASE Clarify!
The Board’s silence is deafening! The Field is thoroughly confused – both officers and assessees. A Commissioner in Hyderabad has given a written clarification that no export duty is payable for clearances of the steel products from the DTA to the SEZ. But the DRI is not impressed, at least not in Hyderabad! They are merrily summoning manufacturers and persuading them to pay the export duty. “What about the Commissioner’s clarification?”, asks the innocent manufacturer. DRI seems to be not bound by it. Has the Commissioner’s clarification provoked the DRI? Now whose dictum is the assessee to follow? - The jurisdictional Commissioner’s or the DRI sleuths’?
There is a concept that the Government should speak with one voice. If the DRI and the Jurisdictional Commissioner don’t agree on an issue, shouldn’t they first resolve the issue before attacking the trade?
Now it is almost confirmed that export duty has to be paid, notwithstanding the brave stance taken by the Commerce Ministry and SEZ Development Commissioners, but the moot question is who should pay it and when?
The export duty is to be paid at the port of export, not at the factory of manufacture and it is to be paid by the person filing the export documents like Shipping Bill or whatever other document is prescribed or accepted.
So duty is payable just before the goods enter the SEZ and the Revenue Department has not kept an officer at the gate of the SEZ to collect export duty. Even the wildest allegations of the DRI cannot charge the manufacturers with smuggling – after all the goods have been properly presented before a Customs Officer for entry into the SEZ. If export duty was leviable, he should have ensured its collection and should not have allowed entry into the SEZ without payment of the export duty.
For the confusion within the Department, can the poor trader be held responsible? At least at this late hour, the Board should come out with a clarification as to whether export duty is payable on clearances to SEZ and if so, the mechanism to pay that duty.
Today we are carrying another Netizen’s Editorial on the subject