The National Board of Revenue (NBR) is going to form two special committees soon to scrutinise containers of exports and imports and their capacity, in a bid to combat illegal activities involving through bond facilities, as well as to tackle money laundering more effectively.
The committees of different Customs Bond Commissionerates (CBCs) will be formed consisting NBR officials from the export and bond departments.
NBR member (Customs Export, Bond and IT) Hossain Ahmed informed customs officials in a recent meeting at Customs Bond Commissionerate, Dhaka (South), meeting source confirmed the matter to The Business Post.
A committee will determine the benchmark for the garment capacity of each standard container, specifying the maximum amount (kg/mt) of garments that can be loaded into the container.
If the product's weight is significantly below the benchmark, the committee will provide recommendations on implementing a flagging system to identify such anomalies.
The other committee will be tasked with offering recommendations on reconciling sales contracts and master Letters of Credit (LC), as well as handling Utilization Declarations (UD) and telegraphic transfers (TT) pertaining to exports. Particularly, their focus will be on instances where these transactions are not linked by a master LC in the Bangladesh Bank dashboard during the advance value repatriation through TT for export proceeds.
Furthermore, the team will conduct a comprehensive analysis of the legal aspects surrounding issues such as Letters of Credit (LC) and offer expert opinions. Additionally, they will present recommendations to address the recent trend of exports falling below imports, sources said.
“Through meticulous surveillance of export activities in the Asycuda World System and MIS System, it has come to light that certain exporting firms are engaged in significant imports of raw materials, particularly accessories, via back-to-back LCs.
These same companies are exporting minimal quantities of finished goods, with some instances where mere 300-400 kg products are shipped using FCL containers”, Hossain said in the meeting.
“There are suspicions of illicit raw material sales occurring in the open market, while the exports of mere 300-400kg products using an FCL container are highly atypical”, he added.
He also said that officials must scrutinise whether money laundering is being perpetrated by channelling export prices out of the country while simultaneously declaring abnormally low export amounts.
In this context, he emphasized the importance of acquiring product shipment details from the Asycuda and MIS Database. Furthermore, he underscored the need to train officials to extract diverse information from these data sources, enabling them to identify anomalies related to exports and imports.
