ISLAMABAD, June 2: The Central Board of Revenue on Wednesday signed a contract with PWC Logistic Group of Kuwait to customize software as required by Pakistan's customs for speedy clearance of consignments.

The contract was signed by CBR chairman M. Abdullah Yousuf and PWC chairman/managing director Bassam S. Khoruy. This was one of the components of the customs administration reform (CARE) project.

The total cost of the CARE project was estimated at Rs55 million. The software will be installed at the Karachi International Container Terminal which cleared 35 per cent of imports through Karachi seaport and has been selected as the pilot project.

According to the agreement, with the implementation of the upcoming Pakistan Computerized Customs the dwell time of consignments would be reduced to 24 hours and customs processing time would come down to a maximum of four hours on average.

It will provide an impersonal and fully-automated processing of customs information and the discretion of customs officials will decrease. One of the key factors of the new system is an online payment of export rebates.

After a few minutes of exports, rebate amount will be sanctioned and intimated online to the State Bank of Pakistan for payment to exporters. PWC will customize the software system in accordance with the requirements of Pakistan Customs within a period of three months.

The Pakistan Customs has already finalized requirements for customization. The importers and exporters will file their clearance documents over the web after assessing their duties and taxes, which will be processed by the computerized system based on risk management selective criteria. For this purpose all the users will be allocated unique user identifiers to enter the system.