Monument to inefficiency

At the start of the week I finally received Christmas cards sent to me by snail mail in mid-December. The greeting cards did not come from abroad, but mostly from Makati and Taguig.

Not all of the greeting cards have been delivered. An expat in Makati told me on Christmas Day that he wrote me a card but he expected it to reach me on New Year’s Day. It’s past the Epiphany and the card still isn’t here.

This is the time you appreciate email, but there are stuff that must still be sent by snail mail. I also prefer handwritten greetings to electronic ones.

Private companies can deliver actual greeting cards in one day, if you’re willing to pay the price. But with the Internet greatly reducing the workload of the state-run postal service, why can’t it speed up its work?

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The case is worse for parcels sent through the postal service. I know several importers who said Christmas items they ordered would arrive very early – for Christmas 2014. They have also given up receiving items they hoped to sell in time for Valentine’s Day.

Yesterday the Philippine Postal Corp. said the release of parcels, including items bought through Amazon and eBay, would have to wait up to five months because of a serious backlog in the Bureau of Customs (BOC).

PHLPost officials said the storage area at the BOC’s Central Mail Exchange Center in Pasay City is “filled to the brim” with some 5,000 parcels waiting to be cleared by Customs examiners. Some of the items have reportedly spilled outside the CMEC building.

Some PHLPost officials reportedly grumbled that BOC personnel worked only four hours a day. It didn’t help that the so-called “–ber” months, when the flood of goods for Christmas usually starts, coincided last year with organizational tumult in the BOC.

Amid renewed accusations of corruption and unsatisfactory collections, Customs collectors were sent to the virtual kangkungan (literally, the swamp cabbage patch) to cool their heels. Several of them fought back, securing restraining orders from friendly judges.

Ruffy Biazon, at the time the Customs chief, was besieged on all fronts – by us carping media critics, crooked career personnel in the BOC, crooked politicians demanding VIP treatment, and administration allies salivating for his post. A criminal complaint filed against Biazon in connection with the pork barrel scam ended his resolve to stay on.

An importer who personally knows Biazon complained to him that BOC personnel were demanding P45,000 to release a small shipment. A broker had advised the importer to just pay up, but the importer decided to try to complain first to the BOC chief.

Biazon told the importer, in so many words, that he was helpless against the long-entrenched system. Career BOC personnel reportedly scoffed that they would still be there long after Biazon had left the bureau, like the many other Customs commissioners before him. As we have seen, the BOC personnel are right.

Caught in that mess were the thousands of ordinary folks without the right connections or money for “facilitation fee” to get their shipments out of that mountain of parcels at the CMEC building. Today many of them are still waiting for their parcels to be released. It’s going to be another happy, prosperous New Year for Customs examiners.

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That massive backlog cuts off the country from a global economy where goods are supposed to move across the planet at jet speed.

PHLPost officials said they believed many of the parcels stuck at Customs were food items meant for Christmas. The items would have spoiled by now.

If it’s any consolation, even VIPs are not spared. An ambassador once complained to us that his personal collection of expensive wines, brought in through diplomatic pouch, was held at Customs. He pleaded with BOC personnel that the wines needed special storage temperature and could spoil in the tropical heat. The Customs personnel were unimpressed. I don’t know how he finally managed to secure the release of his precious wines. Maybe he had to invoke the Geneva Conventions.

Even equipment used for development projects financed through foreign aid are impounded at the BOC. Several foreign diplomatic missions have complained about it.

Red tape and Customs examiners’ personal discretion, as wide as the discretion that lawmakers used to exercise in the utilization of their pork barrel, are built into the system of processing shipments in the BOC. That’s a formula for institutionalized corruption.

Can the new team at Customs make a difference? They are, after all, also transients in the bureau.

Computerization should help. This was attempted about two decades ago, but coverage was limited and the crooks soon found ways to go around the experiment in transparency.

Pinpointing responsibility and setting a deadline for processing each shipment, with rewards given for efficiency and sanctions imposed on underperformers, are also feasible.

The government can invite experts to propose reforms for international best practices in Customs procedures.

That huge pile of Christmas parcels still waiting to be cleared is a monument to inefficiency and the opportunities it engenders for corruption.