The Bureau of Customs (BOC) anti-smuggling campaign under Customs Commissioner Ruffy Biazon has practically gone overdrive as it goes after the fictitious and non-existent companies in its roster of accredited importers and brokers.
In issuing Customs Special Order No. 24-2012 creating the Task Force that will sanitize the BOC’s list of accredited importers, Biazon said, the BOC’s OPLAN BAKLAS will expand the Bureau’s anti-smuggling efforts by scrutinizing the documents of its current list of accredited importers to detect any fabricated entries possibly made by fly-by-night or fictitious companies.
“In our many seizures of illegally imported goods, we encountered some of these importers to be non-existent, although accredited with the Bureau of Customs,” Biazon said, adding that, “The BOC list of accredited importers has been in existence for years already. With our discovery of non-existent and fictitious importers, we will now carefully scrutinize the documents of each accredited importer to validate and verify their actual existence.”
The Bureau’s importers accreditation is done by the Interim Customs Accreditation and Registration Unit (ICARE) under lawyer Rhea Gregorio. This unit used to be under the BOC’s Revenue Collection and Monitoring Group (RCMG) during the time of former Customs Commissioner Angellito Alvarez. Under the BOC’s current leadership, however, ICARE was transferred to the Intelligence Group (IG) under Deputy Commissioner Danilo Lim as part of the BOC’s organizational reforms to streamline its operations and enhance revenue collections.
“I have always believed that if we start with the wrong foot, we will always end up with the wrong foot,” Lim said as he explained that, if in the process of facilitating the release of importations, the supposed consignees of these shipments are fictitious, the end part of the process will definitely be a problem for the government as revenues are lost.
The task force is divided into three groups, the Reconciliation Team led by Ms. Basilisa Absalon, the Filtering Team led by Mr. Ramon Reyes and the Evaluation Team led by Mr. Roberto Salvacion. The Task Force’s implementation of OPLAN BAKLAS brings with it higher expectations from the BOC. Commissioner Biazon himself is anticipating the number of cases filed against alleged smugglers to rise once the task force’s operations go into full swing. Also, it is expected to provide the bureau with a more thorough view of operational details utilized by smugglers and their cohorts giving BOC officials a better idea of how they could counter smuggling tactics in the future.
