FBR decides to retain power of collectorates

SOHAIL SARFRAZ

ISLAMABAD: The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has decided to retain the regulatory power of customs collectorates to deal with the exporters and reduce the domestic sales facility to 20 percent instead of 30 percent under the draft notification of Export Promotion Scheme.

The small and medium exporters still have serious reservations on transfer of audit to the post clearance audit (PCA) having just two offices across Pakistan.

Exporters informed that the FBR has realised the problems to retain the jurisdiction power with the Model Customs Collectorates instead of shifting to Directorate of IOCO in processing and granting the approvals of export promotion schemes.

The exporters welcome this change in draft notification of Export Promotion Scheme and also requested to remove the further anomalies existing in draft notification, such as the IOCO will determine the production capacity and may upload the value of input goods to be acquired by the exporters as defined in sub-rule (7)(8) of Rule-7.

The small and medium exporters are very much disturbed and worried about the transfer of power from Collectorate to PCA, is creating the impractical and quite impending serious implications in execution of audit for exporters existing in other cities.

This will increase the number of problems, duplication of work and increase of cost, this is totally anti-measure of ease of doing business and resultantly anti-export measure.

The delay in audit will ultimately delay to increase the face value by the Regulatory Authority and resultantly exporters will lose the buyers due to timely imports and export shipments.

Small and Medium Exporters stated that they still have serious concerns as well as antithetical remarks over the merger of the DTRE scheme into EOU.

They said that the DTRE scheme has now matured and most exporters are going to avail it properly, especially after the elimination of the zero-rated scheme.

But the upcoming merger of the DTRE scheme into other schemes will create too much problems in practical, as every scheme has own its dynamics and own factors to facilitate the exporters.

The online module into Weboc created for DTRE and EOU already has various bugs and to be removed pending since its formation, as exporters are facing issues on every approval/amendment or increase/decrease the qty/value in DTRE/EOU schemes.