KARACHI: Customs Appraisement South has been able to achieve almost all the collection targets assigned by the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) for the month of December 2014.
Appraisement West was assigned the CD target of Rs 10.095 billion, collection in December 2014 was Rs10.132 billion, a surplus of 0.3 percent; Sales tax collection stood at Rs8.31 billion.
Appraisement East’s target of Custom duty was Rs5.043 billion, collection was Rs5.075 billion up 0.63 percent; sales tax collection in December 2014 stood at Rs10.199 billion.
For December 2014, MCC Port Qasim was given the Customs Duty (CD) target of Rs5.768 billion, collection was Rs5.918 billion i.e. a 2.6 percent surplus; Sales Tax (ST) collection was Rs13.044 billion.
Sources said that Customs was not the importer, therefore assigning collection targets did not make any sense. Sources said that these targets were only to show to the international donor agencies and sometimes Customs had to collect advance taxes from major importers, which then are adjusted in the next import.
FBR has deputed competent officers who had checked corruption and revenue leakage to a large extent, which has increased collection but assigning collections targets was an additional pressure on the staff.
Only if smuggling through Afghan Transit trade and misuse of concessionary SROs by NGOs is curbed, the revenue collection would go up by at least 30 percent.