The Trinidad and To­ba­go Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce (TTCIC) has called on the Min­istry of Fi­nance to ad­dress in­ef­fi­cien­cies at the Cus­toms and Ex­cise Di­vi­sion when it comes to clear­ing im­port­ed goods, par­tic­u­lar­ly dur­ing this Christ­mas sea­son. 

A short­age of staff cou­pled with op­er­a­tional changes in the way in­spec­tions are done, led to a back­log of ship­ments to be cleared, leav­ing many on­line shop­pers un­cer­tain as to if they will re­ceive their or­ders be­fore Christ­mas day.  

Couri­er com­pa­nies and the Down­town Own­ers and Mer­chants As­so­ci­a­tion (DO­MA) have al­ready lament­ed the slow pace in clear­ing im­port­ed goods, es­pe­cial­ly at the Swis­s­port bond in Pi­ar­co.

Yes­ter­day, the Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer (CEO) of the coun­try’s largest busi­ness group, TTCIC, Stephen de Gannes said in an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia that they tried to find a proac­tive ap­proach to the sit­u­a­tion al­most two weeks ago.

“We did write to the Comp­trol­ler and the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance con­cern­ing how long things were tak­ing to come out of cus­toms. They did ex­tend some hours and they did say they would be work­ing slight­ly dif­fer­ent­ly so they would try to ac­com­mo­date more car­go, but we’re not see­ing much of a ben­e­fit,” de Gannes said. 

The CEO said last Mon­day the Cham­ber again wrote to both the Min­istry of Fi­nance and the Comp­trol­ler of Cus­toms and Ex­cise Di­vi­sion to make sug­ges­tions to im­prove ef­fi­cien­cy, how­ev­er, he said the let­ter was nev­er ac­knowl­edged. 

De Gannes said one of those rec­om­men­da­tions dealt with de­mur­rage charges which are in­curred when there is a fail­ure to load or dis­charge a ship­ment with­in the time agreed. 

“The length of time it takes them to get to the con­tain­ers is tak­ing so long that the de­mur­rage, which is the free pe­ri­od, which is al­lowed for you to have your con­tain­er there for in­spec­tion is eat­en up. They al­low you some­thing like sev­en days for it to be at the port, so that Cus­toms can even­tu­al­ly sur­vey them, we have sug­gest­ed at this point that should be ex­tend­ed,” he ex­plained. 

An­oth­er area for im­prove­ment sug­gest­ed by TTCIC is that rent be waived dur­ing de­lays caused by the Cus­toms and Ex­cise Di­vi­sion.

“You see, every day you go over a cer­tain time there’s rent, be­sides de­mur­rage. If there is a de­lay be­cause of Cus­toms, stake­hold­ers have to pay rent. If it is Cus­toms’ fault they should waive the rental fee,” de Gannes sug­gest­ed.

He said they al­so brought at­ten­tion to Cus­toms Of­fi­cers who cause op­er­a­tional de­lays. “Op­er­a­tional de­lays oc­cur as of­fi­cers leave due to weath­er con­di­tions be­cause if it starts to rain, they leave ear­ly and no one can look at the con­tain­ers. So we are ask­ing them not to be so de­pen­dent on good weath­er be­cause if it has a rainy day, they can’t look at any con­tain­ers.”

He said it al­so re­mains a cash-on­ly busi­ness to pay Cus­toms and Ex­cise which they have asked to be changed to in­cor­po­rate card pay­ments. De Gannes said an­oth­er is­sue was a pro­cliv­i­ty to over­time charges where of­fi­cers tend to sched­ule their work out­side of reg­u­lar busi­ness hours to ben­e­fit from over­time pay. 

The TTCIC CEO said it has not re­ceived many com­plaints about the mat­ter from its mem­bers be­cause sev­er­al have seem­ing­ly ac­cept­ed that it is just the way things are.  “Peo­ple feel like they can­not do any­thing about it any­more and we can’t have that po­si­tion in the Cham­ber of Com­merce. We have to con­tin­ue to push for it, but it can be frus­trat­ing,” he said.  

At­tempts to con­tact both Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert and Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Fi­nance Bri­an Man­ning were again un­suc­cess­ful.

He said while he has seen im­prove­ments in the ease of do­ing busi­ness from the Min­istry of Trade and In­dus­try, he ad­mit­ted that Cus­toms and Ex­cise, which falls un­der the Fi­nance Min­istry, is still lag­ging a long way be­hind. 

“We used to have a meet­ing with them every month and at the be­gin­ning of the year that reg­u­lar­i­ty fell right off, and we have not been able to get that go­ing again. We con­tin­ue to write to them, we con­tin­ue to ask them to have those meet­ings, but we can­not get any­thing go­ing with them,” he said.

Trade Min­is­ter Paula Gopee-Scoon did ac­knowl­edge the sever­i­ty of the is­sue but said it is out­side of her re­mit.

Small im­prove­ments

How­ev­er, some couri­ers have re­port­ed that af­ter their con­cerns were high­light­ed by Guardian Me­dia, some changes have oc­curred and they are start­ing to clear goods with more reg­u­lar­i­ty.

EZone Di­rec­tor Paul Pan­tin said, “The ma­jor change they had made is in­stead of hav­ing two of­fi­cers as­signed to each ship­ment which was nev­er this way be­fore, they went back to one of­fi­cer per ship­ment or if they have mul­ti­ple of­fi­cers, then they will do mul­ti­ple ship­ments. Of course, we would love them to go even fur­ther and not have to ex­am­ine every sin­gle pack­age. If you can tell it’s clothes, then let it go, but they still want to open and ex­am­ine every­thing.”

The man­ag­er of an­oth­er com­pa­ny, who asked for anonymi­ty, said since Fri­day it was suc­cess­ful in clear­ing 15 “man­i­fests” and ex­pressed an ap­pre­ci­a­tion to the Cus­toms and Ex­cise Di­vi­sion in an email to its cus­tomers.