PAN Number Likely To Be Used As Unique Identifier For Business To Access NSWS Clearance, Says Piyush Goyal Currently, there are over 13 business IDs that use EPFO number, ESIC number, GSTN, TIN, TAN and PAN to apply for government approvals, according to reports
By Teena Jose
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Union commerce minister Piyush Goyal, on Monday, said that the government is considering allowing businesses to use their permanent account number (PAN) as a unique identifier for accessing the national single window system (NSWS) to seek different clearances and approvals from central and state government departments.
"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. So, 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," said Goyal, in a statement, after a review meeting of NSWS in Delhi.
Currently, there are over 13 business IDs that use EPFO number, ESIC number, GSTN, TIN, TAN and PAN to apply for government approvals. According to Goyal, the PAN number will help automatically populate other application forms received in the system to speed up approvals and he also said that his ministry has already approached the department of revenue on the matter, as per reports.
The national single window system (NSWS) is aimed at reducing duplicity of information submission to different ministries, promotes the ease of doing business and so on. It enables the identification, applying and subsequent tracking of approvals for all integrated states and central departments.
NSWS has reportedly received more than 76000 requests and it has approved around 48000 requests. "Only 514 applications faced some sort of technical glitches, which shows the efficiency of the system," added Goyal in the statement.
The minister further added in the statement that, "We will be moving towards newer areas like all inspection approvals, country of origin approvals, export promotion council applications." He also promised that at the next stage, these will come on the system.
