ABUJA: The current lull in Nigeria’s shipping industry partly occasioned by the Federal Government’s new policy on foreign exchange restrictions is currently taking its toll on revenue generation by the Nigeria Customs Service, as Apapa command of the service loses a whopping N7billion for the month of September.
The Central Bank of Nigeria CBN had issued a new foreign exchange policy, which barred a total of 41 import items including par boiled rice from sourcing foreign exchange at the official market, as part of measures to curtail the high demand of foreign currencies, especially the dollar, leading to the fall of the naira.
Meanwhile, revenue figures released by the command show that it generated a total of N23.3b revenue from Imports for both Federation and non-Federation accounts as against the N30.1billion generated in the previous month of August 2015, representing about N7billion decline.
A breakdown of the revenue statistics signed by the Customs Area Controller in charge of the command, which accounts for over 55 per cent of total revenue collection by the service, Comptroller Charles Edike show that while N12.6 billion was paid into the Federation Account covering import duty, fees and Common Eternal Tariff CET, N10.7 billion was paid into non Federation Account for government agencies.
Further details show that import duty accounted for N11.8billion, fees N32.7 million while the CET collections stood at N733 million.
For non- Federation Account, out of a total of N10.7 billion, the five per cent Value Added Tax VAT accounted for N4.6 billion while the seven per cent Port Levy accounted for N830 million even as the one per cent Comprehensive Import Supervision Scheme CISS was responsible for the collection of N1.4 billion.
Similarly, the 0.5 per cent ECOWAS Trade Liberalisation Scheme ETLS, accounted for the collection of N798 million was while N382 million was collected from the five per cent Sugar Levy even as the Rice Levy, which used to be the single highest source of revenue collection to the command accounted for only N1.3 billion.
