CUSTOMS Commissioner Alberto Lina missed the revenue collection target in the past five months by P43.25 billion, which translates to close to P300 million a day that President-elect Rodrigo Duterte said is lost due to rampant smuggling and corruption.
Records show that in May 2016 alone Customs recorded a deficit of P8.85 billion or P295 million in losses per day.
Lina refused to believe Duterte’s assertion that smuggling and corruption are causing Customs’ collection shortfall. Instead, he blamed the deficit on cheaper crude oil prices.
Duterte has said Customs is one of the most corrupt government agencies, and that has prompted him to order “zero tolerance” for smuggling and corruption at the agency.
The Swine Development Council and the Samahang Industriya ng Agrikultura or Sinag has backed Duterte’s assertion and said the smuggling of agricultural products alone had gone unabated under Lina’s watch.
Citing figures from the United Nations Commission on Trade or UNComTrade, Sinag head Rosendo So said smuggling and corruption in pork meat alone cost the country some P1.17 billion in lost revenue in 2015.
Also under Lina’s watch, So said, some 203 20-foot container vans carrying five million kilos of expired pork meat worth P420 million would have flooded the wet market and put at risk public health had their group not stopped their release.
Of the 203 container vans, only 160 had been traced and the rest had gone missing, So said.
He said SDC and Sinag provided Lina and the Department of Agriculture with the names of the smugglers but nothing was done about them.
“If not from our sources from the ground, these containers could have easily slipped out of the Bureau of Customs premises as importers were said to have ‘secured’ clearances and demanded the authorities release these containers,” So said.
Customs records show it collected P154.86 billion in revenues in the five months to May 2016 against its target of P198.11 billion. ay.
Lina said last year’s target had been difficult to achieve even if the imports of non-oil items had risen since that would not have been “enough to offset the forgone revenues due to lower oil prices.”
He said the foregone revenues due to declining oil prices, as of November, had hit between P50 billion and P75 billion and affected Customs’ collections.
But Lina boasted that despite the P8.85-billion deficit, last month’s collection amounting to P31.78 billion was higher compared to the P26.76 billion recorded in the same month last year.
“For May 2016 alone, the agency registered a deficit of P8.85 billion—a discrepancy from the 21.8 percent for its collection of P31.78 billion,” the Customs report says.
“Compared to their 2015 collection, the bureau recorded higher collection figures with P26.76 billion.”
The 2015 full-year revenue was also lower by 16 percent against the P436.5 billion target.
In December alone, Customs’ collections reached only P37.1 billion against P44.64 billion in the same month in 2014.
