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By Kenneth Jukpor
Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) may suspend the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) valuation system which has disrupted port activities owing to protests from outrageous duties from the e-valuation system by freight forwarders at Tin Can Island Port.
Customs gave this indication during a stakeholders meeting which held at the Customs Training College, Ikeja, Lagos earlier today.
The Customs leadership team which presided over the meeting included three Assistant Comptroller-Generals; ACG Tarrif and Trade, Hamza Gumi, ACG ICT and Modernization, Saidu Galadima and ACG Zone A Headquarters, Modupe Aremu.
“We are meeting on this matter tomorrow and I’m sure we will come up with a solution that will be a win-win for Customs and freight agents. The agents were actually trained ahead of the implementation of the VIN valuation. That was why we were not expecting this kind of response from them when we began the VIN implementation,” ACG Aremu said.
She, however, appealed to freight agents to make efforts to attend future stakeholders engagements ahead of new policy introduction, opining that several meetings were held on the VIN valuation previously but freight agents sent their workers who couldn’t make worthwhile deliberations on the issue.
Earlier, a chieftain of the Association of Nigeria Licensed Customs Agents (ANLCA), Prince Taiye Oyeniyi advised NCS management to suspend the implementation of VIN valuation until an ideal process is structured to capture duties for used vehicles.
According to Oyeniyi, the protests on VIN valuation was a result of the high figures in the new e-system which saw Customs duties of some vehicles become higher that the cost price and freight of the vehicles.
Noting that there is a disconnect between the leadership of freight forwarding associations and the NCS management, Oyeniyi advised NCS to reconsider it’s defunct Customs Consultative Forum as a way to bridge communication gap between the NCS and freight agents.
He, however, urged the striking agents to allow members of customs management team present at the Lagos meeting to take their complaints to Abuja for consideration at the Customs managerial meeting tomorrow.
Meanwhile, ACG Galadima Saidu assured that efforts will be made to bring training closer to customs agents, noting that the centralized trainings organized by Customs headquarters in Abuja has limited the participation and impact of the trainings at the Commands.
To address this challenge, he said further trainings will be decentralized to area commands to be organised by Customs Area Controllers.
“Some persons were found to change VIN figures of their imported used vehicles so as to be processed as non standard VIN to evade complete duty payments,” he said.
Also speaking, a former President of National Association of Government Approved Freight Forwarders (NAGAFF), Chief Eugene Nweke accused Customs of implementing the new system without any notice for stakeholders to prepare for it.
