KARACHI: Customs Chief Collector Appraisement-South Nasir Masroor Ahmed has said that the customs authorities issued valuation guidelines because principal appraisers and appraisers of the Pakistan Customs Services were not applying the customs values of commodities in proper way.
He visited Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) on Wednesday. Collector MCC Appraisement-West Muhammad Saleem, Collector, MCC Appraisement-East Najeeb-ur-Rehman Abbasi, Collector MCC Port Muhammad Bin Qasim Surriya Butt, Additional Collector of MCC Port Muhammad Bin Qasim Irfan Javed and Deputy Collector Afzal Ahmed Wattoo accompanied the chief collector during the visit.
The KCCI President Aamir Abdullah Zaki, Vice President Muhammad Idrees, BMG Vice President Anjum Nisar and other office bearers of the chamber were also present on the occasion.
On the occasion, Chief Collector Nasir Masroor was told about issues faced by business community.
The chief collector termed under-invoicing a dilemma which affects the national exchequer to a great extent, adding that the importers should file true value while trading goods.
“There is a need to launch awareness campaigns so that traders could save themselves from unnecessary delay caused by their own faults like mis-declaration, under-invoicing and tax evasion,” he added.
Speaking at the occasion, the chief collector informed the KCCI that he has constituted a committee comprising of ADCs of all three collectorates to resolve the issues of the trade bodies.
Commenting on the grounding issues of the containers at PICT and KICT, the chief collector made it clear that the said issue was directly linked with the terminal operators, adding that the authorities of Pakistan Customs were planning to hold meetings with the authorities of terminal operators to solve the grounding issues.
He informed the chamber members that the Ministry of Commerce and the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) are working jointly in order to form an Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) to solve FTA issues.
Earlier, KCCI President Abdullah Zaki highlighted the problems being faced by the trade bodies related to Customs.
