Lucy Nnaji
The Murtala Mohammed Area Command of Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), has frowned at the ways legitimate Customs Brokers (licensed) sublet their jobs to miscreants and touts who have no stake in the wellbeing of the industry thereby perpetuating all manner of frauds in order to circumvent government’s law on duty payment.
In a recent statement made available to newsmen by its Public Relations officer (PRO), Joseph Haruna Ephraim, the Command stated that MMA command has put in place systems to fish out touts by checking their Form C30, and would not hesitate to prosecute them to serve as a deterrent to others.
He said the Area Controller of the Command, Comptroller Jane Shoboiki, has advised Customs Brokers, airline operators and importers alike to imbibe the habit of making truthful declarations, which must agree with all other documents required for clearance of cargos such as; PAAR, AWB, SGD, FROM M and packing list, adding that Customs can only facilitate complaints trade when accurate declarations are made while those with discrepancies would naturally be delayed for one correction or the other.
According to him, the command had a total of 6,035 declarants of different currencies including Dollars, Euro and Naira for the year under review, and that the sum of $50 million arrived into the country without proper documentation and this was seized and handed over to officials of Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) in the presence of Department of State Security (DSS) for further investigations.
Meanwhile, he said the Command recorded a total revenue of N29.124 billion for the first half of 2019, representing 112.4 per cent increase in revenue collected for the period under review as against the revenue of N22.724billion collected for the same period in 2018.
However, he noted that the revenue collected from January to June 2019 did not only surpass the revenue target set by the command for the period under review with N3, 219,843,233.00, but also surpassed that of 2018 half year with N6,399,747,155.00.