Senior IRS officer Jayant Misra has been appointed as Director General of Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI). The post was vacant for the last eight months. The move comes two days after a Special Investigation Team (SIT) asked the DRI to verify if USD 505 billion was transacted out of the country between 2004 2013 as part of trade-based money laundering.

Misra is currently DG (Systems) at the Directorate General of Systems and Data Management. Najib Shah, who is now Chairman of Central Board of Excise and Customs, was holding the charge of DG DRI. In October, Shah was appointed as CBEC chief and continued to hold the charge of DRI, entrusted with responsibilities to check customs duty evasion and blackmoney.

Senior bureaucrat S Ramesh has been appointed DG (Systems) in place of Misra. Ramesh at present is Chief Commissioner of Customs in Chennai.

Additional Info

• The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) is an Indian intelligence agency.
• The Directorate is run by officers from Central Excise and Customs.
• Though its early days were committed to combating smuggling in of gold, it has now tuned itself to the changing nature of crimes in the field of narcotics and economic crimes.
• DRI has been successful in combating the menace of fake Indian currency by making effective FICN (Fake Indian Currency Note) seizures.
• The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence functions under the Central Board of Excise and Customs in the Ministry of Finance, Department of Revenue.