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The National Board of Revenue (NBR) has rearranged the Customs Procedure Codes (CPCs) to prevent their misuse and, in turn, save the government huge amounts of money from revenue losses.
There are currently 240 CPCs that have been grouped under nine categories.
As codes, each category has been given a letter of the alphabet, and each subcategory has been given a number along with the corresponding alphabetic letter.
For example, the first category, “Capital Machinery” has been assigned the letter “C” and its subcategory “Capital Machinery Import” has been assigned “C11”.
The tenth category, “General Import” with code “000” remains unchanged.
The NBR issued a notification in this regard on Thursday, and the modifications went into effect on Friday.
“The use of appropriate CPCs in the newly issued SROs is crucial to preventing misuse of CPCs and ensuring proper implementation of the newly announced budget orders,” read the notification.
Speaking to The Business Post, M Fakhrul Alam, commissioner, Customs House Chittagong, said, “For years, importers have been using CPCs with duty waivers to evade advance trade VAT (ATV) and advance income tax (AIT) on goods that aren’t supposed to be eligible for duty waivers, costing the government huge sums of money in revenue.”
“The modification is intended to prevent importers from committing such irregularities and the revenue losses from import duties,” he added.
He went on to say that the authorities would revise the changes if they turned out to be ineffective, adding that the effectiveness of the changes cannot yet be assessed because they have not yet been implemented.
