Philippine customs collects over $8 M in 2014

MANILA, Philippines (Xinhua) - The Philippine Bureau of Customs' ( BOC) revenue collections rose by 21 percent to P369.044 billion ($8.37 billion) in 2014, a senior government official said today.

Customs Commissioner John Sevilla said this was based on the preliminary reports that his office collected.

He attributed the increase to the effort of BOC to curb smuggling, but acknowledged that much has to be done to improve the performance of BOC.

Sevila said that processing of documents by the importers and exporters should be accelerated to maximum of four hours by the end of this year.

In 2013, the BOC collected P304.926 billion ($6.92 billion).