New Delhi, Oct 14 : To ease the woes of service tax payers and assesses, the Delhi Service Tax Commissionerate launched the Automation of Central Excise and Service Tax (ACES) here on Wednesday.

ACES is a new centralised and web based software application of the Central Board of Excise and Customs that is now available to the service of tax assesses.

ACES offers various online facilities and services such as registration, filling of service tax returns, refund claims, filing of intimations, tracking, dispute resolutions and online viewing of your records.

Launching the service, Special Secretary S. K. Goel said: “The ACES would help the trade community to transact any of their matters related to service tax sitting anywhere in the world as long as they have access to the Internet facility.”

Describing ACES as a win- win opportunity for both the trade community and the government

Goel said: “The new system would help in improving government service and also help to monitor tax payment and early dispute management systems.”

Additional Director General at the Directorate of Systems, D. P Dash, said: “ACES reduces the paper work, visits to the departmental offices, and improving transparency, accountability and efficiency in indirect tax administration in the country.”

“ACES would replace the current mode of manual filing of returns, payment of taxes, seeking of refunds or rebate of duties, obtaining various permissions and approvals from the department by

an electronic interface,” Dash added.

He further elaborated that ACES would enable assesses to obtain registration of Central Excise

and Service tax online, to file statutory returns electronically, claims, intimation and also to view and track the status of their documents online.

ICWAI Chairman Uttam Praksh Agarawal assured all help in making ACES accessible to the community.

The Directorate of Systems in co-operation with Hewlett Packard, Tata Consultancy Services, BSNL, Wipro and the National Information Centre, has developed the ACES software.

With its launch in Delhi, ACES will now be available in seven service tax commissionerates out of the 27 in the country.

The service tax department is hoping that ACES would be user friendly in an era in which problems such as delays in registration, non- processing of refunds etc should be complaints of a bygone era.

ACES would enable the department to gather and access to data and ensure MIS functionality leading to a fair and responsive tax administration. (ANI)