THE Bureau of Customs (BOC) is strengthening its Post Entry Audit (PEA) Group to reduce audit processing time, said Customs commissioner Alberto Lina during the recently concluded Aircargo Forwarders of the Philippines, Inc. (AFPI) general membership meeting.
"The auditing will now be conducted within 24 hours to ensure that fraud and other forms of corruption will be lessened, if not, eliminated," he noted. The PEA system is in compliance with the World Trade Organization valuation system and part of the amended Republic Act 9135 or the Tariff and Customs Code of the Philippines.
The scheme involves post-evaluation of import cargo records to guarantee integrity of information supplied to the BOC by importing companies at the time of entry lodgment. It requires importers to keep at their principal place of business for a period of three years from the date of filing of the import entry, all records of their importations or books of account, business or computer systems and all other customs commercial data.
These could be in various forms, including payment records, relevant for the verification of the accuracy of the transaction value declared by the importers on the import entry. Auditing will be done when firms voluntarily request auditing, when errors in the import declaration are detected, or when firms are selected by a computer-aided management system.
