India's first LTU to start from October in Bangalore

Bangalore, Sep 11 (UNI) India's first 'Large Taxpayer Unit (LTU), aimed at providing a transparent tax paying administrative set up for the large companies will start functioning here from October.

Disclosing this to newsmen, Central Excise Chief Commissioner (Bangalore Zone) K S Nair said 31 large taxpaying companies had agreed to participate initially in this path breaking set up for trade facilitation in line with the global practices of tax administrations. Prominent among them included Kirloskar Toyota Company, ABB, 3M India, Mysore Sales International Limited, Canara Bank, Vijaya Bank and Vysya Bank.

Those who paid upwards of Rs one crore tax would be handled in this Unit by an officer of the rank of the Assistant Commissioner.

This would be a single window facility, he added, saying many more corporate entities who had single PAN banner would be included in coming days.

He said the recent amendments to the Central Excise Act provided an optional scheme for voluntary payment of duty by assesses, in full or part, in cases of involving fraud, mis-statement along with interest and 25 per cent of the duty amount as penalty within 30 days of receipt of the show cause notice thereby dispensing with the rogours of adjudication procedure.

The amendment to Rule 16 of the Central Excise Rules was also amended retrospectively to declare the independent wire drawing units as 'assesses' for the purpose of payment of central excise duty.

It aimed at facilitating 'wire drawing units' which had a sum equal to the duty leviable on 'drawn wire' after availing the credit of duty paid on inputs for the period May 29, 2003 to July 8, 2004.

This amendment was to regularise credit taken at the input stage by the downstream user of 'drawn wire' and the amount paid as central excise duty on clerance of drawn wire, he clarified.

He said the zone had collected a revenue of Rs 4164 crore during 2005-06 as against Rs 3621 crore collected during 2004-05 registering a growth of 15 per cent. The service tax collection registered a growth of 65 per cent during 2005-06 by realising Rs 1259 crore as against Rs 761 crore during 2004-05. The performance in duty collection during the current year (upto August 2006) had improved over the last year during the same period, he added.

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