Rad­hi­ca Sookraj

Pres­i­dent of the T&T Cus­toms Bro­kers Union, Leroy Lee Chong, be­lieves there will be mass re­trench­ment, loss of Gov­ern­ment rev­enue and im­por­ta­tion of dan­ger­ous drugs and equip­ment in­to T&T, if Gov­ern­ment pro­ceeds with its bud­get pro­pos­al to im­ple­ment an ex­pe­dit­ed cus­toms ser­vice for low-val­ued com­mer­cial con­sign­ments.

In an in­ter­view yes­ter­day, Lee Chong said the union was call­ing for an emer­gency meet­ing with Fi­nance Min­is­ter Win­ston Dook­er­an to dis­cuss state­ments made in the 2010/2011 bud­get. In his bud­get speech, Dook­er­an said a for­mal cus­toms en­try was re­quired for goods val­ued US $1,000 or more. As a con­se­quence, Dook­er­an said, all con­sign­ments of a low­er val­ue were ad­mit­ted with­out the re­quire­ment for the im­porter to pro­vide a cus­toms en­try. The main con­sid­er­a­tion at the time, Dook­er­an said, in­clud­ed "pro­vid­ing a sim­pli­fied and ex­pe­dit­ed pro­ce­dure for the ex­am­i­na­tion and re­lease of low val­ue con­sign­ments."

He said: " We will now in­crease the val­ue to $20,000 for which no for­mal cus­toms en­try is re­quired. This mea­sure re­quires no amend­ment to the Cus­toms Act." How­ev­er, Lee Chong de­scribed this new arrange­ment as il­le­gal and said it could have neg­a­tive con­se­quences for the cus­toms bro­kers as well as T&T as a whole. "We can­not un­der­stand how this mea­sure could be men­tioned as we be­lieve it is il­le­gal and con­trary to the ex­ist­ing arrange­ments for cus­toms clear­ance di­rect­ed to house­hold and per­son­al ef­fects," Lee Chong said. He said un­scrupu­lous busi­ness­peo­ple would at­tempt to de­fraud the State by mak­ing false de­c­la­ra­tions about the quan­ti­ty of their goods.

"There will be no checks and bal­ances. We could have un­der­valu­ing of ship­ments be­cause there is no sys­tem in place to check the goods," Lee Chong said. He added that would al­so leave an open­ing for peo­ple to bring in guns and drugs in­to T&T. "Al­so con­sign­ments will be bro­ken up in quan­tums of $20,000 per ship­ment to beat the sys­tem and this will lead to a loss of rev­enue for the state," Lee Chong said. Ex­press­ing con­cern of im­pend­ing mass re­trench­ment Lee Chong said the jobs of cus­toms bro­kers soon would be­come re­dun­dant.