Excise & service tax officers writes to MoS Personnel seeking timely promotions

An association of central excise and service tax officers have written to Minister of State for Personnel Jitendra Singh seeking his intervention in ensuring timely promotions for them.

The Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) finalized executive assistant recruitment rules in 2015 without consulting stakeholders, including the employees involved, according to the association.

According to the letter by Chitrasain Garg, Secretary-General of the All India Central Excise and Service Tax Ministerial Officers' Association, a tax assistant who was getting his first promotion in three years now has to wait ten years for his first promotion.

Officials claim that the protection clause is missing from these recruitment rules, and as a result, they must wait ten years for promotions instead of three.

According to them, the CBIC sent a file to the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) several times, but each time it was denied due to different observations.

"Because the Department of Transportation has yet to approve the insertion of a protection clause and the residency period has been increased from three to ten years," the letter stated. "A minimum of 3,391 vacancies (69 percent) in the cadre of Executive Assistants are lying vacant in CBIC, which is adversely affecting the revenue generation system."

The CBIC has now sent a proposal to the DoPT for a one-time relaxation of the residency period in the recruitment rules for Executive Assistants in order to fill these vacancies and strengthen the revenue generation system, it said.