Refunds, rebates disbursed on priority basis, we are focusing on reconciliation of customs duty with utmost care to pass on final revenue figure to FBR
LAHORE: The MCC Lahore Appraisement Chief Accountant Office has been successfully implementing austerity measures taken by the Finance Ministry and the collectorate extending its full corporation in this regard while rebate and refunds of the trader parties sanctioned by the collector are being issued on priority basis after pre-audits.
Reconciliation of the customs duty is another area where the work is being done with utmost care to pass on a final and authentic figure to the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR).
This was stated by the MCC Appraisement Lahore Chief Accounts Officer Shahid Mehmood during an exclusive interview with Customs Today here. The work policy of Chief Accounts Officer is to revolves around three major points including facilitation to client and general public by efficient service delivery and good behavior, zero tolerance for corruption and corrupt practices and ensuring implementation of relevant rules and regulations while discharging official duties.
He said that Chief Accounts Officer plays an advisory role on financial and accounting matters for the collectorate besides prepares budget and gets its approval from the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR). In this regard, the Chief Accounts Office is following the austerity measures of ministry of finance and the collectorate is also taken on board in this connection. The credit goes to outgoing collector of Customs Appraisement Muhammad Zahid Khokhar who helped us a lot to implement these measures in letter and spirit.
Answering to a qurry he added that the Chief Accounts Office also disburses rebate and refund in accordance with the rules and regulation but the Chief Accounts Office has a very small amount of rebate and refund to disburse. Major part of the refund and rebate disbursed to the traders’ parties by Chief Accounts of the Preventive collectorate.
The Chief Account Office disbursed rebate of Rs 7108196 and refund Rsb50. 5 million during the outgoing financial year 2014-15 while rebate of Rs 4 million and refund Rs 6 million has been reimbursed during the first quarter of Fiscal Year 2015-16, he shared the figures.
“In order to avoid slightest chance of corruption we have brought some innovations in the process of disbursing refund cheaques. The Chief Accounts Office initiated the practice of mentioning NTN, account numbers of the parties on the cheques ensuring that the cheques are duly realized by the authorized party by the same day,” he informed, adding that earlier, rebate and refund cheaques of WEBOC systems were not being issued and in order to facilitate the collectoarte Chief Accounts Office prepared SOP and enabled the collectoarte to issue the rebate and refund cheques.
In answer to another question, he said that the Chief Accounts Officer reconciles the customs duty collected by all the collectoarte and directorates in Lahore and that very figure is acknowledged for the final and authentic collection of customs duty by FBR any other higherforum.
“Many times Customs duty is wrongly treated as sales tax and vice-versa. Recently Rs 30,0,6,636 were wrongly being treated as Customs duty while it belonged to sales tax account after that we corrected the entry,” he explained.
Similarly, during the last financial year we identified Rs 8 million wrongly transferred under the head of customs duty to sales tax head and corrected it. The Chief Accounts Office his looking after GP fund, medical and salary accounts of above 500 customs officials besides pensioners are also being facilitated, Shahid Mehmood concluded as saying.