The Philippine Bureau of Customs (BOC) has created a task force assigned to purge fictitious companies from the agency’s list of accredited importers.
Created under Customs Special Order No. 24-2012, the task force (Oplan Baklas [literally Operation Remove]) will help BOC’s anti-smuggling efforts by scrutinizing documents of importers and detecting fabricated entries lodged by fly-by-night companies.
“In our many seizures of illegally imported goods, we encountered some of these importers to be non-existent, although accredited with the Bureau of Customs,” commissioner Rozzano Rufino Biazon said.
“The BOC list of accredited importers has been in existence for years. With our discovery of non-existent and fictitious importers, we will now carefully scrutinize the documents of each accredited importer to validate and verify their actual existence.”
The task force is divided into three groups: the Reconciliation Team led by Basilisa Absalon; Filtering Team led by Ramon Reyes; and Evaluation Team led by Roberto Salvacion.
Biazon expects the number of cases filed against alleged smugglers to rise once the task force’s operations go into full swing.
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