The Government has approved ₹ 2,256 crore outlay for Project Saksham to bolster the information technology network for the new GST regime. Project Saksham is the name given to CBEC’s IT Infrastructure Project. This IT Infrastructure project will enable not just the implementation of Goods and Services tax (GST) but also support all existing services in Customs, Central Excise and Service Tax. In addition, it will also enable extension of the Indian Customs Single Window Interface for Facilitating Trade (SWIFT) and other taxpayer-friendly initiatives under Digital Indian and Ease of Doing Business of CBEC. 

The Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC) IT systems need to integrate with the Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN) for processing of registration, payment and returns data sent by GSTN systems to CBEC, as well as act as a front-end for other modules like audit, appeal and investigation. The information filed by taxpayers (for eg., Registration, Returns etc) on the GSTN portal will be transferred to CBEC systems via a link established by GSTN from their data centres to CBEC data centres. This information will be subsequently processed by CBEC’s officers and the action taken will be transferred back to GSTN portal over this network. Thus, Project Saksham will enable setting up of an information exchange mechanism with GSTN through the use of pre-agreed Application Programming Interface (API) or other secure methods of message exchange. 

There is no overlap in the functions to be performed by the systems of CBEC and GSTN. CBEC’s systems will be required to process data pertaining to Registration, Returns and Payment Modules which will be transmitted by GSTN to CBEC for backend processing. For other modules related to statutory tax functions such as Audit, Investigation etc. CBEC systems would provide front end interface to tax payers. 

This was stated by Shri Santosh Kumar Gangwar, Minister of State in the Ministry of Finance in written reply to a question in Lok Sabha today.

Information exchange mechanism between tax IT systems enables integrated GST data processing and front-end taxpayer services. Project Saksham funds establishment of an information exchange mechanism linking CBEC and GSTN data centres via pre-agreed APIs or secure message-exchange methods so CBEC can receive and process registration, returns and payment data transmitted by GSTN, act as front-end for audit, appeal and investigation modules, and return CBEC actions to the GSTN portal; the project maintains that there is no functional overlap between CBEC and GSTN systems.