Introduction of facility of payment Tax Refund claim amount directly to Exporters Bank account instead of issuance of cheques - Service Tax - Trade Facilitation Notice No. 06/2016

OFFICE OF THE COMMISSIONER OF CUSTOMS, CENTRAL EXCISE SERVICE TAX HYDERABAD-IV COMMISSIONERATE, POSNETT BHAVAN - TILAK ROAD - HYDERABAD - 500 001 C. No. IV/16/1987/2014 ST (T) Div-I Date :23.06.2016 Trade Facilitation Notice No. 06/2016 Sub: Introduction of facility of payment Tax Refund claim amount directly to Exporters Bank account instead of issuance of cheques - Reg. 1. Attention of the members of Trade, Industry and all concerned is invited to the subject matter mentioned above. At present, as a matter of practice, the amounts sanctioned towards service tax refund claims are being sent through cheques, which are delivered either by hand or by speed post. 2. The present procedure of sending cheques by hand or registered post is cumbersome and entails a lot of paperwork. Besides, there could be occasions when the cheques are returned back due to incomplete address or change in address and other clerical errors. All these factors might lead to considerable delay in realization of the refund amount by the claimants. To alleviate the hardship of the claimants, a facility for payment of refund amount, directly to the exporters / claimants bank account instead of by way of cheques is being introduced in the Hyderabad-IV Commissionerate i.e., Divisional offices of Service Tax Divisions-I and 3. The procedure under the new facility is as under : i. All claimants shall provide one time authorization in duplicate in the format annexed to this Trade Facilitation Notice in original by 30 th June 2016. ii. The Service Tax Divisions would forward a statement on a weekly basis on every Friday to the State Bank of India, SBH-Treasury Branch, Hyderabad, in soft copy through email and a hard copy under the signature of the Assistant / Deputy Commissioner (refund sanctioning authority) along with the cheque for the consolidated refund amount covering total amount of refund claims processed and sanctioned, during the corresponding week, in the relevant Division. A copy of the authorization letter from the exporter will be retained by the concerned Division. iii. Upon receipt of the statement signed by the Assistant / Deputy Commissioner and the cheque for the consolidated refund amount iv. quantified in the above manner, the bank would make payment to the respective claimants in their accounts through NEFT / RTGS after deducting the applicable NEFT / RTGS charges as per RBI guidelines. The said bank will forward a scroll indicating the Name of Bank, Branch, A/c No. and the total amount transferred, after deducting the applicable Bank charges to the concerned Divisions on weekly basis. v. Concerned Divisional Office, after receipt of scroll from Bank mentioned in Para (iii) above, will state all the details in relevant Refund file, and deface all the original documents of claim submitted by claimant and complete the claim file, Then it will be sent within 3 days to Hqrs. Audit for Post-Audit of the claim. Divisional AC/DC will endorse the copies of the order sanctioning the relevant claim, to all the offices / authorities, as is being done at present. vi. There will be no change in the existing procedure of pre-audit in applicable cases. 3. Superintendents(Tech), Service Tax, Division-I II can be contacted in case of any difficulty or if any information is required. The landline no 040-2476451 t. 4. From 1 st July 2016, all the Service Tax Refund amounts will be credited through e-payment and no individual cheques to the claimants will be issued by the refund sanctioning authorities. Hence all the claimants are requested to submit the required authorization by 30.06.2016 (A. R. S. Kumar) COMMISSIONER