Citizen Charter for any Organization in the field of Public Service is an express declaration by Organization on rights of the public and obligations of the public servants formulated on certain co-operations from the citizens.
Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG) on 31 May, 2002 launched www.qoicharters.nic.in that features the Citizen’s Charters issued by various Central Government Ministries/Departments/Organisations with valuable data and links.
As such Citizen’s Charter is not Exclusive to Central Govt and its Ministries. In fact, every govt. agency, whether under Central or State which is into delivery of Public Service has to have a Citizen’s Charter. DARPG co-ordinates with govt agencies and guide them formulate individual Citizen Charter.
Because Citizen’s Charter is a set of self-declared promises by govt organizations on the condition of stakeholder’s co-operations they are not legally enforceable.
Background of Citizen’s Charter adopted by Govt. of India
The concept was first articulated and implemented in the United Kingdom by the Conservative Government of John Major in 1991 as a National Programme with a simple aim: to continuously improve the quality of public services. With widespread awareness on key elements of a good governance i.e, transparency, accountability and responsiveness, the Citizen’s Charter under various captions were implemented in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Jamaica and Malaysia in subsequent. It was in this atmosphere, a conference of Chief Ministers of various States and Union Territories held on 24 May, 1997 in New Delhi, presided over by the Prime Minister of India.
The outcome of the conference was adoption of an “Action Plan for Effective and Responsive Government” at the Centre and State levels. One of the vital decisions at that Conference was that the Central and State Governments would formulate Citizen’s Charters, starting with those sectors that have a large public interface e.g., Banking, Railways, Telecom, Posts, Public Distribution Systems.
Aim of Citizen’s Charter:
Basic aim of Citizen’s Charter is to improve public services by a logical approach which includes but not limited to:
- Making administration accountable and citizen friendly.
- Ensuring transparency and the right to information.
- Taking measures to cleanse and motivate civil service.
- Adopting a stakeholder approach.
- Saving time of both executant and the clientele.
Rationale behind Citizen’s Charter:
As public services are funded by citizens, either directly or indirectly through taxes, they have the right to expect a particular quality of service that is responsive to their needs and is provided efficiently at a reasonable cost.
Stakeholder’s for Customs Department
Cutting Edge level Stakeholders: CHAs, Exporters, Importers, Shipping Agents, Container Agents, Freight Forwarders etc. Top level stakeholders: Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI), PHD Chamber of Commerce & Industry (PHDCCI), Federation of Indian Exporters Association (FIEA), Quality Council of India (QCI), Container Corporation of India (CONCOR), Customs Clearing Agents Association. And most importantly the officers and staff associations of the department.
Reference Framework of Citizens’ Charter in India
A Handbook on Citizen’s Charter for Govt. of India has been published by Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG) on https://goicharters.nic.in/cchandbook.htm which features layout of any Citizen’s Charter that will be made in India by any govt agency. The handbook gives comprehensive look into successful implementation and suggests keeping pace by evolving on all key essentials too.
What are the Vital Components of a Citizen’s Charter?
As per handbook on Citizen’s Charter A good Citizen’s Charter should have the following components:
- Vision and Mission Statement of the Organisation
- Details of Business transacted by the Organisation
- Statement of services including standards, quality, time frame etc. provided to each Citizen/ Client group separately and how/ where to get the services
- Details of Grievance Redress Mechanism and how to access it.
- Expectations from the ‘Citizens’ or ‘Clients’
- Additional commitments such as compensation in the event of failure of service delivery.
Citizen’s Charter for Customs Department/ CBIC
This Charter is the declaration of our mission, values and standards to achieve excellence in the formulation and implementation of Customs, Central Excise and Central Goods and Service Tax, IGST policies and enforcement of cross border controls for the benefit of trade, industry and other stakeholders.
Vision
Our vision is to be a modern and professional indirect tax administration, safeguarding our economic frontiers adopting stakeholders centric approach based on trust and voluntary compliance.
Mission
Our Mission is to provide an efficient system by:
- Formulating progressive tax policies & processes to enable smooth economic activities.
- Realising revenue in a fair, equitable, transparent and efficient manner.
- Managing cross border movements of goods and people with a view to ensuring safety and security of citizens and economy of the country.
- Facilitating capacity enhancement of all stakeholders to improve compliance.
- Adopting international best practices and promoting bilateral and multilateral international cooperation.
- Investing in human capital to achieve a high level of integrity, competency and committment.
- Administering goods and services tax across India in harmony with state tax administrators.
- Innovative use of technology & techniques for maximum facilitation and minimal intervention.
- Combating tax evasion & commercial frauds with interventions based on risk assessment using analytics & predictive technology.
Our Strategy
The strategy for achieving our mission shall comprise the following:
- Benchmarking of operations and adopting best practices
- Enhancing the use of information technology
- Streamlining Customs, Central Excise and CGST, IGST procedures by employing modern techniques like risk management, non- intrusive inspections and accredited clients’ facilitation
- Evolving cooperative initiatives with other government and private agencies and building partnerships with trade, industry and other stakeholders
- Measuring conformance to service delivery standards
- Developing professionalism through capacity building.
Our Key Functions and Services
Regulatory Functions
- Levy and collection of Customs and Central Excise duties, CGST & IGST
- Registration and monitoring of units manufacturing excisable goods and service providers
- Receipt and scrutiny of declarations and returns filed with the department
- Prevention of smuggling and combating evasion of duties and service tax
- Enforcement of border control on goods and conveyances
- Assessment, examination and clearance of imported goods and export goods
- Implementation of export promotion measures
- Clearance of international passengers and their baggage
- Resolution of disputes through administrative and legal measures
- Sanction of refund, rebate and drawback
- Realization of arrears of revenue
- Audit of assessments for ensuring tax compliance.
Service Functions
- Dissemination of information on law and procedures through electronic and print media
- Enabling filing of declarations, returns and claims through online services.
- Providing information on the status of processing of declarations, returns and claims
- Assisting the right holders in protecting their intellectual property rights
- Responding to public enquiries relating to Customs, Central Goods and Service Tax matters
- Providing Customs services such as examination of goods and factory stuffing of export goods at clients’ sites, as per policy.
Our Expectations
We expect citizens to:
- uphold and respect the laws of the land
- voluntarily discharge all tax liabilities
- fulfill their duties and legal obligations in time
- be honest in furnishing information
- be co-operative and forthright in inquiries and verifications
- avoid unnecessary litigation.
Our Standards
We shall follow the following time norms in our services:
- Acknowledge all written communications including declarations, intimations, applications and returns immediately and in no case later than 7 working days of their receipt
- Convey decision on matters relating to declarations or assessments within 15 working days of their receipt
- Dispose of a refund claim within 3 months of receipt of a complete claim
- Remit drawback within 7 working days of,
- filing of manifest in the case of electronic processing of declarations
- filing of a paper claim in the case of manual processing
- Clear the goods, where the declaration relating to any consignment is complete and correct,
- in case of exports, within 24 hours of filing of declaration
- in case of imports, within 48 hours of filing of declaration
- Complete GST registration formalities within 2 Working days of receiving a complete application
- Complete examination and clearance of export consignment at factory premises within 24 hours of accepting the request
- Give minimum 15 days advance intimation before undertaking the audit of assessees’ records
- Release of seized documents, which have not been relied on for the issue of the show cause notice, within 30 days from the date of issue of the said notice, unless otherwise provided under the law.
- Time norms for other activities, as may be prescribed, shall also be observed.
We shall endeavour to achieve minimum compliance level of 80% of the aforesaid time norms. Compliance levels shall be gradually enhanced through close monitoring, standardization of processes, use of IT enabled services etc.
Our Commitment
We shall strive to:
- Be at the service of the country and its citizens
- Work to uphold the economic security and sovereignty of the country
- Make our procedures and transactions as transparent as possible
- Encourage and assist voluntary tax compliance
- Carry out our tasks with:
- integrity and judiciousness
- impartiality and fairness
- courtesy and understanding
- objectivity and transparency
- uprightness and conscientiousness
- promptness and efficiency.
We Further Commit That
- All officers will carry Identity Cards and all uniformed officers will wear name badges while on official duty.
- Personal and business information disclosed to us will be kept confidential subject to the provisions of the Right to Information Act, 2005.
- Assessees will be visited only by authorized officers.
- Due respect will be given to the tax compliance record of the assessees.
- Clearance of consignments will be withheld only after explaining the reasons thereof and an opportunity will be provided before passing any final order.
- Baggage of international passengers will be opened only after explaining the reasons and in their presence.
- Before searching any premises or persons, the reasons thereof shall be explained. Officers undertaking any search operations shall offer themselves for personal search beforehand.
- Full information about appeal procedure shall be provided alongwith details of the authorities with whom appeals can be filed.
- Stakeholders will be consulted continually while reviewing our policies and procedures. Timely publicity of all changes in the law and procedures shall be provided.
- Efforts will be made to enhance the use of information technology in all work areas and enable the trade to have IT based information access.
- Every possible assistance will be rendered by the Public Relations Officer in the Divisional Office/Commissionerate Office/Custom House. The name and telephone number of the Public Relations Officer will be prominently displayed at such offices. Relevant information and details of procedures, as may be required, will also be provided.
The service attributes shall be measured through customer perception feedback on the above commitments with the intention of continuous improvement in service delivery.
Complaints and Grievances
As a responsive and taxpayer-friendly department, we shall have in place the following mechanism:
- We shall promptly acknowledge complaints within 48 hours of receipt and attempt to provide final replies within 30 working days of their receipt. In case it is not possible to send the final reply within the time specified, an interim reply shall be furnished to the complainant.
- In case, the complaint is not attended to, within the prescribed time norms or the remedy offered is not satisfactory, an appeal can be filed with the jurisdictional Commissioner / Chief Commissioner.
- Common complaints and grievances can also be taken up with the Public Grievance Committee, Permanent Trade Facilitation Committee, Regional Advisory Committee and in the Open House meetings.
The detailed procedure for complaints handling process can be viewed on the CBIC website www.cbic.gov.in
Grievance Redressal Officers
At the field level: A Public Grievance Officer has been designated in each Commissionerate / Customs House with whom all complaints and grievances can be taken up. For contact details of the Commissionerate-wise Public Grievance Officer, this link can be checked.
At the Board level: Commissioner (Publicity) has been nominated as the Public Grievance Officer for the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs, whose contact details are indicated below:
Address : Directorate of Publicity & Public Relations, Customs & Central GST,
Central Revenues Building, I.P. Estate, New Delhi-110 109
Phone : 011-2337 9331 Fax : 011-2337 0744
SEVOTTAM: Implementation of Envisioned Values within Citizen’s Charter
Any promise is a lie until an there are practical steps to implement the promises made. Hence, CBIC or Customs adopted an assessment-improvement frame-work of SEVOTTAM.
The model works as an evaluation mechanism to assess the efficiency of internal processes and their impact on the quality of service delivery. This assessment is made through three modules. (i) implementation of the Citizens’ Charter; (ii) implementation of grievance redress system; and (iii) service delivery capability.
The CBIC has a highly knowledgeable taxpayer base and to meet their evolving expectations the three modules play very crucial. Let us see how these three modules help achieve our mission to effectively deliver:
a) Revised Citizens’ Charter that keeps evolving:
A key requirement for effective taxpayer services is to design an effective Citizens’ Charter, one that is easy to implement while meeting the aspirations of the stakeholders. CBEC has a highly knowledgeable taxpayer base consisting of manufacturers, service providers, importers and exporters. They expect us to be dynamic in policy making as per the changing economic scenario. As an indirect levy that gets passed on to the next consumer, we play a key role in the product and services price in the market. Any delay on CBEC part could impact increase the cost of production as well as the cost of supply chain.
In order to meet this expectation, we worked with the taxpayer associations like CII, FICCI, PHDCCI and FIEO to prioritize top ten service functions where the associations need standards to ensure timeliness of delivery. This selective promise of the priority services allows us to focus our resources in key areas for effective implementation as well as for meeting the priorities of the taxpayers. We keep reviewing our Citizens’ Charter at regular intervals to keep abreast with the changing taxpayers needs.
b) Implement CPGRAMS as a robust grievance redress system:
A robust grievance redress system is essential to ensure delivery of promises made in the Citizens’ Charter.
The system needs to ensure accountability as well as transparency. In order to have such a system, we adopted CPGRAMS, the grievance redress systems of DARPG (Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances) after having carefully reviewed the existing grievance redress mechanism. CPGRAMS provides the in-built benefit of improving grievance redress, whenever a new version is launched by the DARPG. Further CPGRAMS allows us the benefit of backward integration with other governmental organizations in case it is required.
However, CPGRAMS is still an IT system that needs proactive response from the field offices to deliver effectively. So the senior field officers have been brought on board by creating a sense of accountability towards grievance redress. From time to time, senior officers are sensitized about the need for effective and prompt functioning of the grievance redress mechanism as a significant component for delivering quality taxpayer services. We have Public Grievance Officers appointed in each field Commissionerate to attend to public grievances.
The grievance redress is monitored at various levels to ensure continued efficacy. Norms of acknowledging complaints within 48 hours of receipt and attempting to provide final replies within 30 working days have been set in Citizens’ Charter for prompt response to public grievances. Our public grievance redress system has improved our accessibility to the taxpayer. A taxpayer could redress his grievance concerning any of our field offices across the country through a common online portal. We have a high grievance redress rate.
c) Developed service delivery capability at Commissionerate:
Creation of delivery infrastructure to meet promises made in the Citizens’ Charter is essential to meet and sustain excellence in services. Considering the enormity of the task, it was decided by CBEC to do it in phases. Accordingly, in Phase-I four formations were identified by the Core Group / Implementation Committee in its meeting held on 16th June, 2009 as Pilot Commissionerates for implementation of Sevottam. Based on pilots’ experience, the delivery requirements have been standardized through a Service Quality Manual (SQM) for replicating capability in at all the field formations.
After internal assessment of Service delivery with time norms at all the pilot Commissionerates and other parameters of single window, taxpayer facilitation, feedback mechanism & grievance redress, BIS awarded the Pilot Commissionerates Sevottam Certificate License No. CRO/SQSC/L-8000035 as per IS 15700:2005 on 4th November, 2010.