new delhi the finance ministry is likely to come out with a plan in a couple of months to gather information on evasion of excise duty through sources like electricity bills and vat payments in a couple of months we will have plans to gather third party information on excise duty evasion a finance ministry official said the third party information relates to gathering information on the assesse concerned through other sources and then matching this information with excise duty payment to assess whether the party was evading duty or not for this purpose electricity bills or vat payment of companies concerned could be assessed to see whether there are any gross mismatches between their various payments and excise duty payment the official said already third party information called annual information returns exists to check detection of income tax evasion by high spenders there are seven categories through which such detection is made they include information on high value cash deposits credit card payments buying of mutual fund units bonds shares and property etc the necessity to go for third party information for detecting excise duty has arisen because excise duty payments have not been up to the potential in april this year collections under this head fell by 39 per cent to rs 6410 crore against rs 6673 crore collected in april 2007 this has prompted finance minister p chidambaram to admit that meeting budget targets for this year appear to be a formidable task however the finance minister had also said that excise duty collection in april might be an aberration this has partly come true as excise duty collection grew by 44 per cent in may 2008 to rs 9583 crore even this growth falls short of 88 per cent rise targeted this fiscal as per budget estimates to take collections to rs 136610 crore chidambaram had said problems in excise duty collection are related to clandestine movements of goods and misuse of cenvat credit he had advised the central board of excise and customs cbec to revisit the existing deterrent measures stating that they were not deterrent enough as many as 49 cases have been subject to deterrent measures it appears to me that deterrent measures are not deterrent enough the idea is if you take action against one person found guilty of excise evasion the deterrent action taken against that assessee must have salutary effect on the assesses of the same product group chidambaram had said in 2007 the cbec came up with certain measures which were deterrent in nature leading to swift action in cases of planned and deliberate excise duty evasion the nature of restrictions that could be imposed included withdrawal of the facility of monthly payment of duties for a specified period and nonutilisation of cenvat credit for a specific period these measures were put in place in the wake of then strong manufacturing sector performance not getting translated into increased excise duty collections the finance minister had also said that he