KABUL: The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has introduced an online module for safe transportation under the Afghan Transit Trade (ATT), which enables the Afghan Customs to verify containers crossing the border.
Sources in Pakistan Customs said on Monday that the Web Based One Customs (WeBOC) online system for trade clearance, had been amended by the Directorate of Automation and Reform, and introduced for verification of transit goods entering the Afghan territory.
“The directorate introduced the role of Afghan Customs as an external user, and they will acknowledge when a container crosses the border,” said an official at Pakistan Customs.
The latest system has been evolved to eliminate the pilferage of imported goods inside Pakistan. In the past, thousands of containers were missing inside Pakistan as Afghan authorities had not verified those.
The 2011 Federal Tax Ombudsman (FTO) report identified 71,202 ISAF containers that have no information of departure from Karachi or arrival at the border customs stations. In case of 27,871 containers that did arrive at the destinations, their departure information from Karachi was not available.
Another 55,140 containers were shown to have left Karachi, but have no entries of arrival at the border stations.
Around 152,054 containers have records for departure from Karachi and arrival at the border customs station, but no record of crossing into Afghanistan.
“Finally, not a single container, out of 306,267 was recorded to have ever crossed over to Afghanistan during the almost four-year period under reference,” the report had said.
Other amendments made by the directorate in the WeBOC system for Afghan Transit Trade were related to security release of goods.
According to the latest change: “System should generate security release request to Assistant or Deputy Collector concerned when gate-in information is completed regarding all containers for a particular goods declaration (GD).”
The latest changes also restrict traders and clearing agents for filing security release request.
The sources said that the latest update in the WeBOC system would resolve many issues with transit trade and help the country to prevent revenue losses.
The FTO in its report had forwarded many recommendations that are not being materialised or under process.
The Federal Tax Ombudsman recommended that customs clearance and cross border certification and reconciliation procedures need massive improvement, consolidation and rationalisation; crosschecks need to br upgraded, diversified and externalised; and transport system used for Afghan Transit Trade needs to be organised on competitive basis, and transporters given a level-playing field, etc.
