Member Customs, Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), Mukarram Jah Ansari, has assured the members of All Pakistan Textile Mills Association (APTMA) that all of their outstanding issues related to Export Facilitation Scheme (EFS)will be resolved.

A meeting at the APTMA house was arranged to this end in which Ansari made these declarations. The meeting was attended by the Director General Customs (Automation) Imran Mohmand, Chief Collector Customs Ms Rabab Sikandar, Director General IOCO Mubashar Baig and Collector Customs (Appraisement) Lahore Nayyer Shafique.

Members of the meeting including APTMA Senior Vice Chairman Northern Zone Kamran Arshad and Secretary General Raza Baqir expressed their views on various problems being faced by the members of the association.

Ansar said that “maximum exports of the country will be shifted to EFS by the beginning of the year 2023. In this regard, sessions will be organized continuously with APTMA members for their facilitation.”

It was decided at the meeting that collector customs Sambrial should be appointed as the focal person to discuss all the issues of EFS with all export associations for their timely resolution. Ansari directed all the member mills of APTMA to forward their queries through APTMA to FBR to save time in their resolution.

APTMA members said that the conditions for value addition were not suitable in the ongoing situation of global recession when commodity prices and values of manufactured goods were constantly decreasing.

Ansari responded by saying that the purpose of all export facilitation schemes was to earn precious foreign exchange for the country. He said he understood the problems of APTMA members since their production costs were higher than the prices of their finished goods. He added that FBR will help APTMA members when they send a detailed reference to it for resolution of their problems.

Collector Customs, Lahore, Ms Ambreen Tarar explained the main features of the scheme. She said all the exporters should apply for the EFS as early as possible, since all the existing schemes would become redundant by August, 2023.

Director General Customs (Automation) Imran Mohmand informed that all pending modules of export schemes especially indirect export module, transfer of inputs and intermediary goods have been developed. These modules had earlier been deployed under trial operations. He further said that a detailed training workshop will be arranged on indirect export module and other system related aspects at APTMA Lahore on November 03 to educate exporters on salient features of the modules.

In his welcome address, APTMA Senior Vice Chairman Northern Zone, Kamran Arshad thanked member customs and other customs officers for expeditiously honouring their commitment of rolling out indirect export and other modules of Export Facilitation Scheme, which had been pending since promulgation of EFS in July, 2021.

He said, “all the indirect export GD, filed manually to date, should be loaded in the system to avoid any future complications. Transfer of plants and machinery in case of merger of two EFS users was not allowed yet despite complying with all procedures and formalities of SECP, FBR, banks and other regulators.”

He added that the “revolving value should be introduced where the amount of exported goods might be automatically restored in the approved value. There should be automatic switching from any of the existing schemes to EFS without linking it to detailed audit which takes a long time and suspends all operations.”

He emphasized the need to fully implement zero-rated procurement of local goods and services, adding that “weight variation might be allowed if established in independent surveys and accepted by suppliers by remitting the equivalent foreign currency through banking channels.” 

Kamran said that, “customs valuation ruling of March, 2017 regarding cotton waste, was still being applied for calculation of manufacturing wastage despite the fact that global cotton market has drastically fallen.”

The meeting ended when Ms Rubab Sikander, Chief Collector Customs Lahore, thanked APTMA for organising the meeting and hoped that such interactive sessions would continue in the future for mutual benefit of trade, industry and the department.

Credit : Independent News Pakistan-WealthPk