KARACHI: Chairman, Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), Salman Siddique, has said that the new indigenously developed auto-clearance of cargo system, WeBOC, is on trial and would continue to function on a limited scale for another three weeks.

Speaking at a meeting of the Pakistan Hosiery Manufacturers Association (PHMA), he said the government had been looking for an alternative indigenous system of auto-clearance of cargo to replace the existing system owned by a Kuwait-based company.

He urged the exporters to pinpoint the shortcomings of WeBOC so that it could be improved and made more user-friendly.

Mr Siddique said the FBR wanted to know whether the system was functioning properly, and, therefore, requested the World Bank to analyse the system and help estimate its cost and capacity of handling the workload.

He said the Kuwait-based company, Agility, having Intellectual Property Right (IPR) to handle the PaCCS system, had demanded a hefty amount of $62 million for its previous dues and $42 million for the rest of the period.

Earlier, Pakistan Apparel Forum Chairman Javed Bilwani apprised the FBR chairman of tax-related problems being faced by value-added textile exporters and issues relating to customs rebate, sales tax refund and audit.

He said that after the shifting of the RTO office from Nipa, the exporters had started facing problem in sales tax refund and scores of cases were pending since 2004. He said that the FBR should help resolve the longstanding issues.

Mr Bilwani said that the refund of genuine exporters was blocked while others got their cases cleared without any problem. He complained that the customs authorities did not provide monthly statements on rebate to exporters who wanted to know if the rebate had been transferred to their bank accounts.

Mr Bilwani said that the customs authorities have failed to meet their demand for provision of statements to exporters due to which they were facing problems. He said the customs authorities were not transferring rebate cheques which were found filled in a number of sacks piled up at the customs office.

Mr Bilwani urged the FBR chief to solve this problem on a permanent basis. He said that the exporters wanted to get their statements from customs on a monthly basis and urged the FBR chairman to solve the problem on a permanent basis.

He also told the meeting that the sales tax office had wrongly transferred Rs10 million to the bank account of someone else while showing the exporter's profile as clear of refund. But after an intervention, the case was finally settled. He said that the system had such flaws which blocks huge amount of exporters and even record is not properly maintained and asked the chairman to protect exporters from such issues.