the goan I network
PANAJI
The State government’s Excise Department on Sunday said the mobile app launched by it to assist the various categories of liquor traders report their daily procurement and sale of liquor stocks was only meant to facilitate logging the details and is not the sole methodology to report the
details.
“Excise license traders are supposed to maintain an account of liquor transactions on a daily basis as per Rule 101 of Goa Excise Duty Act and Rules 1964 and submit the record monthly to the excise department,” an explanatory statement issued by the department said.
Those traders who haven’t started using the app and are not comfortable switching to the digital mode to meet the statutory requirement of logging their daily procurement and sales can continue in the physical mode, the Excise Department statement said.
Commissioner of Excise, Amit Satija, IAS, told The Goan that the mobile app for reporting the stock movement was introduced only as a measure to facilitate the process and is not mandatory for the traders.
“Since March when it was developed and introduced, over 1,000 traders and businesses in the liquor trade have begun using it because it makes it convenient for them instead of maintaining the records physically on registers daily. However, the app is not mandatory,” Satija said.
Political parties had on Saturday raised objections to the Excise Department asking traders to file their stock returns on a daily basis through the new mobile app saying it was “harassment” of small businesses dealing in alcohol including the thousands of bars dotting the State.
With the new tourism season just begun, sales of alcohol through the hospitality industry are expected to spike steeply and officials of the excise department expect large-scale unaccounted trading to also correspondingly rise.
The move to popularize the mobile app for logging the stocks movement was also aimed at checking the unaccounted alcohol trading, a top Excise official said.
