LINGAYEN: Customs Commissioner Ruffy Biazon said yesterday the Bureau of Customs (BOC) had implemented many reforms over the last two years.
Speaking at the 1st North Philippines Economic Summit held at the Sison Auditorium here, sponsored by the provincial government of Pangasinan, Biazon said transshipment procedures in the BOC had been tightened to prevent containers going missing. He said that among the weak spots in the bureau’s cargo management was the transshipment of goods between ports of discharge and free port zones, which resulted in the loss of over 2,000 containers in 2010.
Biazon said they had tightened their watch on the various free ports and economic zones in the country to avoid their being used for smuggling.
“We are strictly enforcing our customs laws in the free port zones, even as we try to help make it easier to do business for free port zone locators,” he added.
The BOC’s reform programme would benefit traders at the Port of San Fernando, La Union where port operations were expanded to beef up economic activity in the Ilocos region and the Cordillera Administrative Region.
Records of the National Statistics Office for the past five years showed that the country’s imports posted an average growth of 3.7 percent while the average growth rate of exports reached 2.2 percent, Biazon said.
“On a year-to-year basis, we have sustained a steady growth in our volume of imports and exports,” he said.
He said that while the country enjoys a significant growth in the volume of trade in the global market and even as it remains bullish in its economic outlook, the Philippines still needed to catch up with the rest of the world economies, particularly among Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) members.
Biazon said the BOC was in its final stage of computerisation and it had put in place the e2m or electronic-to-mobile system.
The system, designed to facilitate faceless, paperless and cashless transactions at the bureau, has minimised, if not eliminated, human intervention in the processing of entries in the BOC, he said.
“Human intervention and abuse of discretion by some customs misfits in the processing of customs entries have been found among the causes of corruption in the BOC,” Biazon said.
The Philippine star
