A former National President of the National Association of Government Approved Freight Forwarders (NAGAFF), Dr. Eugene Nweke has that there was nothing to cheer about the Nigeria Customs Service(NCS) surpassing its yearly revenue targets, he said surpassing the target indicates over taxation of importers.
Nweke, who said this in Lagos in a chat with Shipping Position Daily, added that bumper revenue collection should be the least criterion for accessing efficiency of the service.
Explaining further, he urged Nigerians to look at it from the point of the implications of the high revenue collection.
He added that within the past five years a lot companies have folded up due to over taxation.
He said: “I don’t use bumper revenue generation as a tool to access customs performance per annum. Rather I see high revenue generation by customs as a critical pointer to over taxation of importation”
“You also check out how many companies sprang up from customs each year. If you generate too much revenue and so many companies are folding up will you look at yourself that you are doing very well. Whatever has advantage, also has disadvantage. You go back and see so many companies have folded up in the past five years”
Nweke said one of the critical indicators of performance is the total cargo throughput in the ports.
“People like us are not easily influenced to look at higher revenue generation as a critical key indicator for performance. When you want to rate customs and its efficiency you have to check what is the dwell time of cargoes within customs control, what is the total cargo throughput handled by customs”
“These are critical performance indicators through which you can access customs. If you check all these, it now tells you whether cargo throughput is high or not. Whether cargoes were able to get to the owners’ warehouse on time or not. With that you can now say whether the customs is good or not and you can now say that trade facilitation is good or not” he concluded.
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