KARACHI: MCC Appraisement West has made it mandatory for the clearing agents seeking license renewal to personally appear before the Customs authorities, as Customs has streamlined licensing procedure for clearing agents to check agents’ involvement in various scams.
It may be mentioned here that licenses of 122 agents are expiring on December 31, 2014; these agents had been sent notices by the Collectorate in this regard. Now the clearing agents or their partners or the directors, in case of a pvt. Ltd company, would present themselves before Additional Collector Dr. Iftikhar Ahmed.
Deputy Collector Naveed Iqbal and Principal Appraiser Sahibzada Ikram would scrutinize the credentials of agents and forward the cases to Dr. Iftikhar for further processing. The exercise is being undertaken on the directives of Collector Mohammad Saleem
There are over 3000 clearing agents in Karachi, but only 1700 agents approximately are active as a large number of licenses were suspended for the reported involvement of agents in Afghan Transit Scam, mis-declaration and recovery cases.
The licenses of clearing agents are renewed two years and some 1500 licenses would expire by December 12, 2015. Agents seeking renewal were required to submit an affidavit to the affect that no case of tax fraud and criminal case has been finalized from the Court of Law or Tribunal against the licensee or any of the partners, as the case may be; information about total number of declarations filed showing declarations of imports and exports separately and detail of cases made out against them; proof of payment of renewal fee which shall be rupees two thousand for renewal of license for two year.
Moreover, the agents were asked to submit an undertaking to furnish the Certificate of participation (tor each year) in mandatory course from Directorate-General of Training and Research (Custom, Sales Tax and Federal Excise), within three months or as and when the course is conducted by the Directorate; Updated attested copy of Tenancy agreement; Copy of latest income Tax Return and sales tax filed and Copy of CNICs of Proprietor, Partners, Directors.