The Government constituted a High Powered Committee (HPC) on “DRISHTI” -(Driving Information System for Holistic Tax Initiatives) in February 2014.  The Committee is headed by Shri T.V. Mohandas Pai, Chairman, Manipal Global Education and consisting of eminent persons from the private sector having in depth domain knowledge as well as senior officers from the Department of Revenue.

The Committee has finalised the Report after holding extensive discussions with the departmental officers, technical experts, taxpayers and other stake holders to understand the present business practices, IT initiatives and stakeholders expectations.

On 21^st  October, 2014, the Committee submitted its Report on “DRISHTI” to the Hon’ble Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley. The Report, after examining the existing business processes and the current status of IT Systems in CBEC, has highlighted the areas for improvement. The recommendations of the Committee aim at leveraging IT for improving the quality and extent of taxpayer services, encouraging voluntary tax compliance and detecting tax evasion.

The Strategic Recommendations of the Committee include the following:

• Creation of National Taxpayer Services Directorate, National Assessment Centre for Customs & National Processing Centre for Central Excise & Service Tax Returns, National Targeting Centre & Directorate of International Customs
• Setting up of specialised function-based units for Data Analytics & Business Intelligence, Tax Dispute Resolution and Litigation, BPR, etc
• Leveraging Service Oriented Architecture for IT Applications
• Merging different Customs IT Applications into a Single System
• Enabling Mobility solutions in Business Workflows
• Introduction of Entity-based Risk Management System
• Introduction of IT Centric HR Policy

The Committee also examined the suitable options for an appropriate IT Governance Model for CBEC. The recommendations have been classified as Short (upto 2 years), Medium (2 to 4 years) and Long Term (4 to 6 years). The Committee has also suggested steps for overseeing the implementation of the above Recommendations.

Tax administration IT reform: centralise national processing and analytics to improve taxpayer services and risk targeting. The report proposes centralising tax administration functions into national units-including a National Taxpayer Services Directorate, National Assessment Centre for Customs and a National Processing Centre for returns-and creating specialised function based units for Data Analytics, Dispute Resolution and BPR, while recommending merging customs IT into a single system, adopting Service Oriented Architecture, enabling mobility, introducing entity based risk management and implementing IT centric HR policies, with actions sequenced as short, medium and long term under a governance oversight framework.