Key Points Of Project Saksham for CBEC

Introduction

The Central government Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) headed by Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi approved Project Saksham to ease GST implementation on 28th September 2016. Project Saksham is a back end IT Infrastructure project integrating CBEC and GSTN systems.

Need for Project Saksham

GST is to be rolled out by April 1, 2017
In order to integrate GSTN with CBEC, IT infrastructure has to be upgraded
Project Saksham integrates CBEC and GSTN Systems
Project Saksham is developed under Digital India Initiative

Project Cost and Tenure

Project Saksham cost is 2256 crores
Tenure of the CBEC and GSTN integration project is 7 years

Concerned Authorities

• Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC)
• Goods and Service Tax Network (GSTN)

Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC)

• CBEC is a part of finance ministry under the department of Revenue
• Deals with policy formulation pertaining to customs, excise and service tax
• Administers the prevention of smuggling activities
• Administers all indirect tax laws
• Main role is the regulation of import and export trade
• Frames the EXIM Policy of India
• Publishes all export and import related procedures and documents
• Subordinate houses include
   a.Central excise commissionerates
   b. Custom houses
   c. Central revenues control
   d. Service tax commissionerates 
• Head quarters located at Ministry of Finance, New Delhi

Goods and Service Tax Network (GSTN)

• Established under section 8 of new companies act
• Non-Government entity
• Not for Profit organization
• Private Limited Company
• Indian government holds an equity of 24.5%
• State Finance Ministers empowered committee holds 24.5%
• Remaining 51% with private financial institutions
• Set up mainly to provide IT Infrastructure for GST implementation with a corpus of 10 crore
• Aim is to provide a uniform interface of tax payment system between centre and state
• Now each state has its own system of collecting indirect taxes
• Integrating all these systems in a single unified system for the overall implementation of GST is the purpose of GSTN
• Head quarters located at New Delhi

Stakeholders

• CBEC
• GSTN
• Tax payers (36 lac currently)
•  Exporters
•  Importers
•  All Indirect tax payers (65 lac after GST)

Software Developers

• GSTN acts as the front end
• Infosys develops GSTN software
• CBEC acts as the back end
• Wipro develops CBEC software
• CBEC acts as the front end for investigation, appeal and audit only

Benefits

• Project Saksham will help in effective implementation of GST.
• Digitalization of customer accounts and scanned documents
• E-services to speed up indirect tax collection
• Convenience to tax payers
• Extension of SWIFT Initiative
• Integration with e-taal, e-nivesh and e-sign government initiatives
• In accordance with Ease of Doing Business
• Subsume local levies

SWIFT code for Banks

• Standard format of money transfer between banks in India
• Bank identifier code
• Banks use the SWIFT code for message exchange between them
• Swift code has 11 characters or 8 digits
• 8 digits code denotes the primary office
  
   a. 11 characters represent the following
   b. First 4 digit represent bank code and are only letters
   c. Next 2 letters country code
   d. Next 2 characters location code
   e. Last 3 characters branch code
• Swift network spans across the world with 40000 live codes
• Registration handled by Society for World wide Inter bank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT)
• Head quarters located at La Hulpe, Belgium
• Project Saksham will serve as an extension of this Swift network

Challenges

• Integration of existing CBEC system with GSTN is a complex process
• Handling huge information
• Hardware and Software requirements including infrastructure etc.
• Duplication of data
• Information security
• Deadline is Short
• Software Implementation issues
• Training of employees
• Customer awareness and education to the new system