ISLAMABAD: Member Customs, Federal Board of Revenue, Zahid Khokhar has disclosed that a project of Electronic Data Interchange between Pakistan and China has been completed and the system is ready to be launched. ‘There is no delay from our side’. Pakistan is waiting for a green signal from China. We are also working on Electronic Data Interchange Project with UAE and Afghanistan but this project will take some time.
This was stated by Member Customs Zahid Khokhar while giving an interview to Customs Today.
He remarked that I have appointed honest and staunch Customs Officers in all the field formations with this direction that eradicate the menace of corruption and facilitate the importers and exporters according to rules and regulations. He told CT that, during last Financial Year (2016-17), Customs has showed marvelous performance and achieved the customs duty collection target with 23 percent growth and hoped that we will achieved the target of current financial year too.
Pakistan Customs has collected Rs496billion record revenue in Financial Year 2016-17 against the set revenue target of Rs461billion. He said we formulated a strategy for sharing the burden of Karachi ports with the dry ports which were established in Punjab and other provinces so that the burden of containers could be distributed. Because there is a lot of burden of imports at all the ports of Karachi therefore customs officers need sufficient time to check and examine the containers which is not possible in short time.
He said the Federal Board of Revenue’s burden sharing project has been failed by the Punjab government as it levied Rs0.9 percent infrastructure development cess in the current financial year’s budget (2017-18) on the ‘goods manufactured, produced or consumed in the province, goods imported into or exported out of the province’. The tax has directly hit the cost of goods, he stressed. The cess is being received at a fixed rate of 0.90pc of the total value of the goods as assessed for the Customs purpose which will be used for maintenance, development and improvement of the infrastructure in the province.
Now importers are giving priority to Karachi ports for receiving their containers there because the cost of container has increased at dry ports, he maintained.
In response to a question, he said all the evaluation rulings and their classifications are available on the FBR website for importers when importers log in on the FBR then automatically the FBR system evaluates the goods. He said Pakistan Customs has improved with the passage of time and we are ready to meet the future challenges.
