The Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) has assured the Nigerian trading public that the basis for calculating duty payment in Nigeria remained the Cost, Insurance and Freight (CIF).
Speaking at a Public forum in Lagos, an Assistant Comptroller of Customs, Mr. Anthony Ayalogu pointed out that the CIF which had been the basis of calculating duty in the country was still in force and had not changed advising that people should not misconstrue the implementation to mean a change in the terms of trade.
Also reacting to a question on whether or not the implementation of the ECOWAS CET would lead to a reduced cost of doing business in the ports in especially in the area of port charges, Mr. Ayalogu stated that the ECOWAS CET was still at a stage known as the Customs Union explaining that at this level, efforts were on those aspect that had to do with the customs.
“Port charges do not pertain to customs, they are outside customs. It may be determined when we enter the Market Union. In this current stage, we are dealing with customs related matters, your port charges are not customs related”, he explained.
He recalled that in the customs document, there was what was known as the Customs External Tariff saying that that was a misnomer and a wrong interpretation terms even as he corrected that there had never been customs external tariff.
According to him,” Even though at the back of our own tariff, it is still there; customs external tariff, that was wrong. It is good to correct that. CET only started this year, we have never had CET before and we are only starting CET now. It is true that in 2006, there was an attempt to enter into CET but it was not successful. We still had our different external tariff on our countries. So, it was not correct”.
Explaining the Concept of the Import Adjustment Tax, the Assistant Comptroller disclosed that there was a little problem in the implementation of CET in Nigeria explaining that what Nigeria Customs Service had been using in the country was ASYCUDA platform which according to him enabled people to print out their declarations even as he admitted that the country had not transited to NICIS which was the new platform the Service wanted to adjust to, as a result of that, it was difficult to change the heading of the ASYCUDA.
He continued,” Normally, under the old regime, you know we have duty, trade portal, ETLS and CISS and there is no where it could be written Import Adjustment Tax and so, what we have done was to fizzle that format and then take many of them and allocate them these new tariff we have found.
“We have many more taxes that we called the statistical taxes, community tax, IAT, anti-dumping tax, anti-contravening tax and so on but there has to be an adjustment of those headings which the technical team has not done yet. “So, what we have is IAT in our declaration. When you say levy, what it actually mean is IAT”.
