`We are trying to improve computer-aided system`

Q&A/ Ajai Singh, member (computerisation), CBDT

Backed by technology, the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) is now undergoing a comprehensive business process re-engineering exercise that will allow the income-tax officers to focus on scrutiny and data instead of getting bogged down with routine paper-work, Ajai Singh, member (legislation and computerisation), told Prashant K Sahu. Excerpts:

What is the status of computerisation programme?

To centralise processing, there were three big pieces in the whole exercise. The primary data centre has been set up in Delhi, a business continuity site at Mumbai and a disaster recovery site at Chennai.

This comprises the essential hardware that will become the core of the entire back-office transaction processing and remote transaction processing. This in effect means that distributed processing, which was going on at 33 data centres, will be shut down incrementally.

All the 13,000 users of the department's internal network can work on a single database for processing transactions. All offices in 540 cities have been connected to the central system. This makes a complete private network for the department.

In addition, the key thing is to transfer the legacy data to the national data centre, a process that will start from June and be over in six to eight months. The department now needs a robust software system. A consultant's report on business process re-engineering has come and we will soon invite tenders. We hope the new software will be ready by the year-end.

What changes does the report propose?

The CBDT is still examining and considering the broad parameters. The broad change that will happen is that we will be setting up central return processing facilities to separate routine, bulk work like processing of returns from higher value work like dealing with tax policy and increasing compliance.

Currently, the same set of people are doing both these jobs. This consumes all our administrative resources on the ground. So, we are planning to transfer the processing work to back offices