The Central Board of Excise and Customs has been awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Excellence in Public Administration for the year 2012-13. These awards are given to acknowledge, recognize and reward the extraordinary and innovative work done by officers of the Central and State Governments for outstanding and exemplary performance, initiatives and projects whose qualitative and quantitative outcomes/results are of a very high order, and which have benefited a large number of citizens/stakeholders. Thrust areas for nominations include Introduction and implementation of innovative schemes/projects, bringing perceptible improvements in systems and building up institutions and making public delivery systems efficient and corruption- free.

This award, received by Chairman CBEC Shri Kaushal Srivastava from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has been given for CBEC’s Information Technology Consolidation Initiative in the category of ‘Organisation’. The Directorate of Systems, CBEC, has implemented a consolidated IT infrastructure which has enabled CBEC to host all its e-services for taxpayers and other external stakeholders across Customs, Central Excise and Service Tax from central data centres. The key outcomes of the project are enhanced service delivery to taxpayers, transparency, increased efficiency and advanced analytics based decision support system through its Enterprise Data Warehouse project.

Using this infrastructure, CBEC on an annual basis gets on an average more than 1 Crore Customs documents and thirty five lakh Central Excise and Service Tax returns filed electronically by a registered taxpayer’s base which is more than 25 lakhs. This infrastructure has also enabled stakeholder facilitation services like online Registration, e payment of duties, reimbursement of drawback claims and document tracking etc. This project, implemented at a cost of approximately Rs. Hundred Crores per year, has enabled CBEC to collect more than Rs. Five Lakh Crores per year in taxes. The same infrastructure hosts CBEC’s e-commerce portals www.icegate.gov.in and www.aces.gov.in as also CBEC’s website www.cbec.gov.in which get a total of about 3 billion hits annually. CBEC has its own email domain webmail.icegate.gov.in which is also hosted on this infrastructure and it supports more than one lakh emails daily for the trade partners and departmental users. CBEC also has a disaster recovery capability for its critical IT services.

This project was certified in 2011 for compliance to the ISO 27001:2005 standard for Information Security by STQC, a body under the Ministry of Information & Communications Technology.

CBEC's IT consolidation enables centralized e-services, electronic filings, payments, and analytics with ISO 27001 security. The Information Technology Consolidation Initiative established consolidated IT infrastructure and central data centres to host CBEC's e-services across Customs, Central Excise and Service Tax, enabling centralized online registration, electronic filing and payment, reimbursement of drawback claims, document tracking, departmental email services, disaster recovery capability, and ISO 27001:2005 information security certification while supporting high volumes of electronic transactions and advanced analytics via an Enterprise Data Warehouse.