Circular No.ES/420/2018-19 March 22, 2019
To: Members of the Council
Sub.: Electronic Communication / Transmission of Customs documents to Trade
Dear Member,
We would like to inform you that Air Cargo Complex (Sahar) has issued Public Notice No. 04/2019 dated 14th March, 2019 regarding processing of Bill of Entry / Shipping Bill in Indian Customs EDI System (ICES) and taking print of First Copy / Out Of Charge (OOC) copy of Bill of Entry and Let Export Order (LEO) copy of S/Bills.
With an intention of making a move towards paperless transactions between the Customs department and the trade, CBIC is now replacing paper copies of Bill of Entry (import goods declaration) and Shipping Bills (export goods declaration) with electronic versions.
In this regard, CBIC has announced the following two new initiatives–
‘iCODE’ (Indian Customs Original Document of Electronic Data Interchange) for Electronic communication/ transmission of Customs documents to the trade.
Under iCODE, the Customs department will send the Bills of Entry (B/E) & Shipping Bills (S/B’s) electronically to importers and exporters.
The B/E & S/B’s will be digitally signed and have QR codes for authentication. These shall be sent through email to the registered email IDs of respective Customs brokers.
The electronic (PDF) copies of B/E & S/B’s will replace the paper copies of Bill of Entry & S/Bs signed by “Out of Charge” officers currently to make entire clearance process faster and greener. These OOC officers are the ones who issue Let Export Order (LEO).
ICEDASH— an “Ease of Doing Business” dashboard to monitor daily clearances at each port. It has already been made available in the Customs IT system, ICES.
A pilot implementation for generating and transmitting of first copy of B/E (copy after assessment, presented for examination) in PDF has now been made operational. Earlier, the PDF version of B/E had QR codes but did not have the digital signatures.
For more information, members may kindly refer to Public Notice No. 4/2019.
Thanking you,
Yours faithfully,
S. BALARAJU
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
