Agents kick as Customs plans tracking down 250,000 cars imported without duties

Not less than 250,000 vehicles, suspected to have come into Nigeria without paying the required Customs duties, between 2014 to 2016, are to be targetted by the extension of time given the dealers and owners to pay such duties.

This is contained in a document sighted from the Tin Can Island Customs office.

A new customs policy, requires vehicle dealers and owners to pay for any difference to the customs before the end of 2016, but the Comptroller-General (CGC) of the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), Col. Hameed Ibrahim Ali (rtd), announced on Friday that a month of grace had been extended to all affected vehicle owners to pay and obtain the required customs duties on or before April 2017.

Confirming the development, the spokesman of the Nigerian Customs, Mr. Joseph Attah, said to ensure effective implementaion of the directive, the four zonal headquarters of the service had been instructed to creat special desks to attend to affected vehicle dealers and owners ready to pay the duties.

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The four zone headquarters for the payment are: Zone A, Yaba, Lagos; Zone B at Kabala Doki, Kaduna; Zone C, Nigeria Ports Authority, Port Harcourt; and Zone D, at Yelwa Tudu Road, in Bauchi State.

“The CGC therefore calls on all persons in possession of such vehicles to take advantage of the grace period to pay appropriate duties on them, as there will be an aggressive anti-smuggling operation to seize, as well as prosecute owners of such smuggled vehicles.

But complaints from some of the dealers said the policy of forcing them to pay for duties that they had earlier paid amounts to double taxation.

The Association of Licenced Customs Clearing Agents (ALCCA), through its secretary, Mr. Benson Mahakwe, said the organisation had been raising some issues against the new directive, because it shows lack of cordination by the authorities.

Mahakwe lamented on the hardship that the new policy is bound to cause on all importers and their clearing agents.

“Vehicle dealers usually pay all charges at the points of entry of their consignment. And this is usually through the Customs offices at such places, backed with documents to support such payments.

“Why asking the same people to go through the sysyem again by way of verifying genuineness of such payments, which is as discouraging as anti importation policy,” the scribe stated.

He alleged that the idea of asking the affected dealers to make the payment through the zonal headquarters of Customs is another means of creating more bottleneck, because nothing works at the zonal offices.

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