CEIB nodal agency for all economic offences wings, suggests govt panel

A committee, headed by retired Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) member S S Khan, today suggested setting-up of a collaborative hub-and-spoke structure of partnership between the Central Economic Intelligence Bureau (CEIB) and enforcement and regulatory agencies of both the Centre and states to combat serious economic offences and organised tax evasion.

The committee said in view of the growing complexity and sophistication of economic offences, collaboration among agencies engaged in enforcement of economic laws should be the central tenet of the government’s strategy.

In the proposed structure, CEIB will be the nodal agency maintaining comprehensive national database of specified types of economic offences investigated by various agencies.

 

The agencies will share information with the CEIB, which, in turn, will be able to provide back-end support, linkages and insights harnessing the power of databases and data analytics to the agencies, and a holistic view of these activities to the government, CEIB said in its report. The report was presented to Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee today.

The committee has also recommended a series of steps to empower and modernise the CEIB and equip it with IT-enabled tools to effectively perform its role in the changing economic scenario, the finance ministry said in a statement.

The government had appointed the committee in March 2011 to review the role, functioning and structure of CEIB and to recommend steps to streamline and strengthen financial intelligence gathering and its dissemination for effective coordination among its intelligence organisations.

The panel was also asked to identify relevant commercial databases for business intelligence analysis by CEIB, suggest structural linkages between CEIB and Financial Intelligence Unit-India and to prepare a roadmap for CEIB to work in line with the best global practices.

Other members of the committee were retired Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC) member Vijay Lakshmi Sharma and retired senior economic advisor Kewal Ram. Deputy Director General CEIB Arun Sahu was the member secretary of the committee.