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The Bureau of Customs (BOC) is eyeing P10 billion in additional revenues from unpaid duties and taxes of oil importations in the last three years.

Customs Commissioner Napoleon Morales said in an interview yesterday that the bureau has already started checking records of all oil shipments through its Post Entry Audit Group (PEAG) to determine if oil importers are paying proper duties and taxes, following last month’s discovery of technical smuggling of gas oil imports by two firms.

“We will monitor all oil shipments within a three-year period to collect additional government revenues from possible underpayment, especially from the ports of Subic, Manila and Batangas, which accommodate the most volume of oil among the country’s 15 ports of entry,” he explained.

“Any additional revenues collected from the measure will be added to the bureau’s cash collection to help achieve the 2007 target of P228 billion,” he said.

Morales admitted there is a need to boost the BOC’s collection drive as it failed to meet its target for the quarter by approximately P6 billion due to the low volume of oil importations and the cleanup of the Shell depot in Batangas.

In its increased revenue generation, the bureau is migrating to the AsycudaWorld software, which seeks to convert to electronic all transactions of the bureau as part of its anti-graft and corruption campaign, and the operation of the NUCTECH x-ray scanners, which aims to curb smuggling in Philippine ports.

The scanning process takes only two minutes as compared to the half-day time frame for manual stripping and is also much cheaper.

Executive Assistant at the Office of the Commissioner (OCOM) lawyer Giovanni Imaysay earlier said that Morales has mobilized the PEAG in the review of previous oil shipments so that the bureau could be at par with other Customs organizations in the world in trade facilitation.

He added that in other countries post entry audit groups are considered to be very vital factors in Customs offices.

“Here, we are now more focused on monitoring the entry of goods but in other countries they are more concerned about trade facilitation,” he said. “They want to expedite the process and check for irregularities in documentation only once a year. They check their records for abrupt changes in value, and collect the discrepancy at the end of the year.”