KAY-MARIE FLETCH­ER

Se­nior Re­porter

kay-marie.fletch­er@guardian.co.tt

Cus­toms and Ex­cise is grap­pling with a ma­jor val­u­a­tion prob­lem, Cus­toms Comp­trol­ler Ri­ad Ju­man re­vealed yes­ter­day while de­fend­ing his of­fi­cers’ con­duct in as­sess­ing im­port­ed prod­ucts.

Ac­cord­ing to Ch­agua­nas East MP Van­dana Mo­hit, the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty—in­clud­ing en­tre­pre­neurs in her con­stituen­cy—has long ex­pressed griev­ances over what they de­scribe as ar­bi­trary ques­tion­ing and over­val­u­a­tion of in­voic­es by Cus­toms staff.

“Busi­ness­men are con­stant­ly left frus­trat­ed and feel they are be­ing un­fair­ly treat­ed by un­pro­fes­sion­al of­fi­cers,” Mo­hit said, ques­tion­ing whether val­u­a­tion of­fi­cers are prop­er­ly trained to in­ter­act with cus­tomers.

Dur­ing a Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee (JSC) in­quiry in­to the Port of Port-of-Spain, Ju­man de­fend­ed the of­fi­cers, ex­plain­ing that the is­sue is not poor cus­tomer ser­vice but a nec­es­sary re­sponse to com­bat val­u­a­tion fraud.

He re­vealed that in­ter­nal in­ves­ti­ga­tions fre­quent­ly un­cov­er in­voic­es that fall far be­low “ac­cept­able norms” for iden­ti­cal or sim­i­lar items.

Ju­man said, “We prob­a­bly open a can of worms here. There’s a ma­jor is­sue with in­con­sis­tent val­ues. Val­u­a­tion fraud is a big prob­lem that Cus­toms faces.

“Let me say this: every im­porter who brings in items has paid the prop­er price for them. But when my val­u­a­tion of­fi­cers con­duct due dili­gence and find that es­tab­lished ac­cept­able norms for iden­ti­cal or sim­i­lar items are far high­er, and when the ac­tu­al in­voic­es are re­vealed dur­ing our in­ves­ti­ga­tions, we see ex­act­ly how preva­lent val­u­a­tion fraud is.”

He em­pha­sised the spe­cialised na­ture of the Val­u­a­tions De­part­ment, ex­plain­ing that of­fi­cers un­der­go in­ten­sive train­ing and ad­di­tion­al re­views with­in the de­part­ment.

“This is not about broad-brush­ing all im­porters, not at all. Based on in­tel­li­gence, in­for­ma­tion, and mar­ket trends, we de­ter­mine which items to re­view. When we no­tice high lev­els of fraud for a par­tic­u­lar item, we may re­move it from the sys­tem for re­view and fo­cus on oth­ers. So it is a big prob­lem, and our Val­u­a­tions De­part­ment is spe­cialised to han­dle it,” Ju­man said.

The comp­trol­ler al­so not­ed that the up­grad­ed dig­i­tal sys­tem, known as Asy­cu­da, will in­clude fea­tures de­signed to tar­get both over­val­u­a­tion and un­der­val­u­a­tion of items en­ter­ing the port, en­hanc­ing the Board’s abil­i­ty to de­tect ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties.