Bureau of Customs scheme to curb technical smuggling

MANILA, Philippines - Local businessmen said technical smuggling will go down after the Bureau of Customs (BOC) agreed to furnish domestic industries with copies of the inward foreign manifest (IFM) which details the relevant information on the imported goods being carried by an incoming ship.

“The inward foreign manifest is a more faithful listing of the cargoes contained in a ship and once we have this document, we can readily alert the BOC through our industry commodity experts any alteration in the other import documents that will be used by smugglers to avoid the payment of proper taxes and duties,” Jesus L. Arranza, Federation of Philippine Industries (FPI) president said.

According to Arranza, with the IFM in the hands of the deputized industry commodity experts (ICE), they now have a solid document to cross-check possible alterations that will be done by unscrupulous traders and brokers to undervalue, misdeclare or misclassify their shipments.

The ICEs are the representatives of the different industries at the BOC. They help in the monitoring and inspection of imported goods.

Customs Commission Napoleon Morales, who has been turning down the request of the domestic industries that they be given copies of the IFM for several years now, finally allowed businessmen to obtain a copy of the document.

Arranza narrated that during a Senate hearing on the unabated cases of smuggling in the country on Monday, Senate president Juan Ponce Enrile and Senators Manuel A. Roxas and Loren Legarda demanded that the BOC furnish the FPI copies of the IFM.

Roxas added that the IFM should be forwarded to the domestic industries at least 24 hours before the shipment arrives.

Arranza said technical smugglers have been gypping the government of at least P120 billion in revenues annually. Aside from this, local manufacturers and farmers are losing the market to smuggled goods because it is impossible for them to compete price-wise.

He noted that even with the minimal to zero duties that are now prevailing in the Philippine tariff regime due to the numerous bilateral, regional and multilateral trade agreements that the country entered into, technical smuggling still continues because importers still have to pay the 12-percent value-added tax and the corresponding excise taxes.