BOC targets 4-hour processing of imports in 2015

By DANESSA O. RIVERA, GMA News

Published October 23, 2014 6:57pm

The Bureau of Customs (BOC) is targeting to cut down the processing time of import transactions to four hours before 2015 ends, banking on equipment upgrade and streamlining of regulations, its top official said Thursday.

"We have a goal, that this time next year, 90 percent of all import transaction will be cleared by Customs within four hours of filing," BOC Commissioner John Philip Sevilla said during the Philippine Business Conference and Expo in Manila.

The BOC official said this will be done through streamlining of rules and modernizing the processing of operations.

"As of today, the Customs is not streamlined, not always predictable and it is definitely not efficient," Sevilla said.

The BOC has long been perceived as one of the most corrupt government agencies and rampant smuggling has marred its reputation.

The first on its agenda is the upgrade of computers, equipment and processing platform, Sevilla said.

"If you take a walk in Customs offices, we don't have many computers, we don't have functioning Internet connections," he said.

"We're actually bidding out contracts for our computers... for our contractor to completely revamp our platform, that's going on now. People working on a very long list," the BOC chief said.

Upgrading the government agency's equipment would lessen red-tape and increase transparency, Department of Foreign Affairs Undersecretary for Economic Relations Laura del Rosario said in the same event.

"The less human intervention there is, the more tech is used, the more transparency will happen, and the less corruption will be involved," she said.

The BOC will also work on refining the rules and regulations on import transactions, Sevilla said.

"We've been studying... port administration and process. Once we've organized... this is something we'll make public because we want to be predictable, streamlined... We want to minimize the amount of digressions," he said.

"We want to get them in place before we start tinkering around the process," he added.

After all these are in place, Sevilla said the BOC will have a new and much better processing system that will result in a much faster processing across the board. – VS, GMA News

Tags: bocimports, boccommissioner, imports, commissionerjohnphilipsevilla