ISLAMABAD, Sept 5: Responding to a news report about customs clearance without payment of duty, published in Dawn’s Sept 3 issue, the Federal Bureau of Revenue (FBR) has said that a number of customs officials had been suspended for negligence in April.

Although the FBR statement made no mention of the Rs1 billion loss suffered by the exchequer because of the non-payment of duty, it acknowledged that an unspecified number of containers had been cleared through the Collectorate of Port Qasim, and not from the Model Customs Collectorate of PACCS, in the past, and at a later stage a few of them were located.

The statement also said that some arrests had been made in this regard. The consignments destined for upcountry dry ports went missing from the Port Qasim Collectorate under the one customs computer system, and forged documents were submitted. In fact, these containers had trans-shipment cargo.

It said the directorate general of customs intelligence and investigation had conducted a thorough probe into the affair and pointed out certain flaws in the working of the computer system which were rectified accordingly.

It may be mentioned that the central point in the Dawn report was about flaws in the software of the PACCS, failure to recover duty and the need to seek help from the Chinese customs department in this regard, but the FBR statement did not mention these issues.