Considering PAN for single window clearance: Piyush Goyal

Commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal on Monday said that the government is considering to allow businesses to use Permanent Account Number (PAN) as a unique identifier to enter into the national single window system (NSWS) for various clearances and approvals of central and state departments. Goyal said that his ministry has already approached the department of revenue for this.

"We are moving towards using one of the existing databases as the entry point, which is already available with the government...and most probably that will be the PAN number. We have approached the revenue department," Goyal said after a review meeting on the NSWS, which witnessed participation from 32 central ministries and departments, 36 states and UTs, and industry associations.

Goyal said that the move will avoid duplication, help auto populate other application forms that are received on the system and speed up the approval process. With the PAN, a lot of the basic data about the company, its directors, addresses, and a lot of common data is already available in the PAN database, he said.

At present there are over 13 different business IDs like EPFO, ESIC, GSTN, TIN, TAN and PAN, which are being used to apply for various government approvals in the system that aims at ease of doing business by reducing duplicity of information submission, compliance burden and enables the identification, applying and subsequent tracking of approvals for all integrated states and central departments. NSWS was started in September last year and is currently under beta testing phase.

New Delhi: Commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal on Monday said that the government is considering to allow businesses to use Permanent Account Number (PAN) as a unique identifier to enter into the national single window system (NSWS) for various clearances and approvals of central and state departments. Goyal said that his ministry has already approached the department of revenue for this.

"We are moving towards using one of the existing databases as the entry point, which is already available with the government...and most probably that will be the PAN number. We have approached the revenue department," Goyal said after a review meeting on the NSWS, which witnessed participation from 32 central ministries and departments, 36 states and UTs, and industry associations.

Goyal said that the move will avoid duplication, help auto populate other application forms that are received on the system and speed up the approval process. With the PAN, a lot of the basic data about the company, its directors, addresses, and a lot of common data is already available in the PAN database, he said.

At present there are over 13 different business IDs like EPFO, ESIC, GSTN, TIN, TAN and PAN, which are being used to apply for various government approvals in the system that aims at ease of doing business by reducing duplicity of information submission, compliance burden and enables the identification, applying and subsequent tracking of approvals for all integrated states and central departments. NSWS was started in September last year and is currently under beta testing phase.