The National Board of Revenue has taken a move to introduce electronic utilisation declaration (e-UD) through integration with the system of the apparel exporters’ associations to prevent fabrication of UD certificates and misuse of duty-free import facility by the exporters, officials said. The online UD system will also ensure transparency in issuance of UD certificates and reduce time for traders in import and export procedures at customs houses, they said. Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association and Bangladesh Knitwear Manufacturers and Exporters Association issue the UD certificates on behalf of the revenue board to its members to facilitate duty-free raw materials import for export purpose under bond facility. The decision was taken at a stakeholders’ meeting held at the revenue board with NBR chairman Md Nojibur Rahman in the chair on implementation of online UD and online export mechanism. Representatives from the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry, BGMEA, BKMEA, Bangladesh Bank, finance ministry, commerce ministry and other government agencies attended the meeting. The meeting decided to form a working committee consisting of representatives from the exporters, the NBR and the central bank to chalk out the plan for implementing the decision, an NBR official told New Age on Tuesday. He said that the committee would also fix the date for commencement of the e-UD and e-export (e-EXP), determine the ways of implementing the decision and needed preparation for different parties, mainly the revenue board, BGMEA, BKMEA and the central bank. Under the decision, the server of the BGMEA and BKMEA would be integrated with the Asucuda World server of the revenue board. BGMEA and BKMEA would instantly upload the UD certificates in the Asycuda World server so that customs officials can directly check the authenticity of the certificates, quantity of approved raw materials for executing export orders and other relevant information online. Currently, exporters submit the hard copy of UD certificates to the customs offices and customs officials check the authenticity of the certificates browsing the server of the respective associations which usually take time. On the other hand, customs officials cannot verify the genuineness of amended UD certificates as those are not uploaded on the associations’ server though a significant number of the certificates are amended multiple times. There are allegations that unscrupulous traders sell the raw materials imported duty-free under bonded warehouse facility in local market for reaping extra profit though they are supposed to produce products using the raw materials for export. Sometimes, they do not bring back the export proceeds against the export items, officials said. Introduction of e-EXP will also help the customs to prevent the misuse of bonded facility through online checking the consignment-wise volume of export, amount of export proceeds, destination of exports and if the exporters have exported and brought back export earnings in line with imported raw materials as exporters will have to submit the documents online, they said. ‘The main purpose of the plan of introduction of e-UD is to ensure digital availability of the relevant data with the customs officials so that they can verify the documents of amended certificates,’ another customs official said. In many cases, UD certificates have been amended even more than 100 times, he said. An importer brought women’s georgette cloths through amending the original UD certificate which was issued for bringing cloths for producing men’s pants, he cited an example saying that the incidence was identified through conducting physical examination of import consignment. The customs official could prevent such fabrication of UD certificates if they can verify the amended certificates, he said. They will also be able to extract the company-wise data related to duty-free raw materials import and export against the import, he added. Earlier in February last year, the NBR and the central bank introduced electronic letters of credit to prevent duty evasion through use of fake LCs. Under the system, banks upload the LCs on the Bangladesh Bank’s foreign exchange transaction monitoring dashboard which is linked with the NBR system.
