BoC seeking help from China
Manila Bulletin, Philippines
BoC seeking help from China
2 July 2011
By Raymund F. Antonio
MANILA, Philippines — Determined to get to the bottom on the use of fake Free Trade Agreement (FTA) certificates that has defrauded government of billions of pesos in taxes, the Bureau of Customs (BoC) has sought the help of its Chinese counterpart to expose the modus operandi.
At the recent World Customs Organization annual meeting held in Brussels, Belgium, Customs Commissioner Angelito Alvarez said he asked the assistance of the Chinese Customs director-general to provide the BoC with records related to the exports and imports between the two countries.
“I purposely sought him out in the WCO meeting. The Chinese director-general was willing to assist us on this issue,” Alvarez said.
“We need the trade information from China. We need it to isolate and identify the problem area,” he added, referring to the conflicting trade figures between China and the Philippines.
China has reported total exports to the Philippines amounting to $13 billion while the Philippines reported corresponding imports from China amounting to $8 billion.
“That’s a $5-billion difference of Chinese exports that were not reflected in the BoC records as imports,’’ Alvarez pointed out.
Based on the conflicting Chinese and Philippine trade data, there is reason to believe that government has been defrauded of billions of pesos in taxes and duties from the use of fake Certificates of Origin (CO) that were earlier uncovered by the BoC.
In March, the BoC caught the scheme of some importers of using spurious CO that allows them to avail of reduced tariffs for their shipments. The CO provides for tariff preferences under the country’s different Free Trade Agreements. The FTA with China is covered under the ASEAN-China Free Trade Agreement.
The scheme was exposed after a combined team from the BoC and the National Bureau of Investigation arrested businessman George Tan in March after he was caught in possession of 600 sets of bogus AFTA certificates.
In the sting operation, confiscated from Tan were volumes of bogus China-AFTA transaction forms printed on carbonless paper. Reportedly, the fake documents were being sold to importers for P5,000 per set.
This enabled some importers to evade paying the right duties and taxes.
