ISLAMABAD, Feb 11: The government has decided to introduce a pilot project for clearance of goods in 24 hours on risk assessment basis at Karachi Internal Container Terminal (KICT) as part of the interim reform strategy of tax administration.

A senior official in the Central Board of Revenue (CBR) told Dawn on Monday that the proposed project was scheduled to be in operation within next two months as a part of the re-structuring of customs administration.

The objective of the risk assessment was aimed at reducing the time of clearance of goods at port to 24 hours from current 192 hours, which is an hindrance in the smooth flow of business activities of the country, said the official.

Currently the procedure of clearance of goods at ports included- vessel arrival and goods off-loaded in 12 hours; then documents arrived in 24-120 hours; 100 per cent containers were grounded for only 5 per cent examination.

Due to limited space at ports, grounding was staggered over a number of days, the officials said and added customs processing involved minimum 62 steps and 34 verifications, which took at least 48 to 192 hours, said the official.

According to the official, the pilot project is one of the step of interim reform strategy of tax administration, aiming at to determine the workability of new system before it was fully implemented across the country.

With the experience from the project and checking workability of the system, it would be extended to ports for operation in the year 2004 as part of the implementation of the whole reform strategy of the tax machinery.

Elaborating further, the official said that the speedy clearance of goods will be done by introducing the selection procedure of shipment, while they were on the ship.

The official said that under new system the examination of goods would include pre-arrival segregation of cargo on basis of risk profiling through advanced IGM system; weight confirmation during off-loading to find out that the goods declared for duty assessment were actually imported or misplaced by some other goods.

The examination would also include automated allocation for examination, which would reduce the chance of pre-contact of importer with any tax official and examination would be carried out without awaiting for the consignee.

Under the new system, each container would contain packing list of all goods and invoice, while tariff classification of examined goods will be accessible for importers/exporter at port, said the official.