Al Amin :
The National Board of Revenue (NBR) has fixed time limit for placement of new application for bonded warehouse license, a duty-free privilege to exporters, to expedite bonding activities.
According to an office order issued recently, the new application must be placed by nine days, if there are no quarries and other documental complications.
No application will be hung up by the NBR officials without any specific quarry or clarification, it said.
But the time-bound will not be applicable for incomplete application or if it is needed to physical inspection, the order added.
As per the existing rule, the application is supposed to be settled by maximum 30 days.
Mohammad Hatem, Executive President of Bangladesh Knitwear Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BKMEA), told The New Nation, “It is a good initiative but we are apprehended about the implementation of the order.”
“NBR, earlier, had taken many good steps to facilitate the exporters but the measures are yet be implemented properly due to the unknown reasons,” he said.
NBR has fixed the time-bound in the wake of the Customs Bond Commissionerate’s apathy in giving out bonded warehouse licence in recent time.
In some cases, some applicants are waiting for up to a year or longer, businesses alleged.
Mansur Ahmed, Senior Vice-President of the BKMEA, said, “My son, owner of Noor Green Composite Ltd, had applied for the license on September 17, 2020. But it is yet to be settled due to unknown reason.”
“Like my son, many investors have been waiting for several months. The investors are to face big hassle to get it. So, the procedure should be easier,” he said.
He further said, “On one hand, the government encourages us to invest to boost exports. On the other, we face delays in getting license. This is contradictory.”
NBR officials also confessed that there is slowness in issuing license.
One of the reasons is thorough scrutiny of all the documents accompanied with physical verification to ensure that only genuine exporters get the duty-free import privilege and the benefit is not abused, the officials said.
“But this does not mean that we are not issuing license. We are issuing it after checking the compliance status and documents. We are not extending the benefit to noncompliant firms,” one official said, wishing his anonymity.
He further said NBR became hard on granting bonded warehouse privilege amid allegations that a section of license holders sold out the duty-free items to the domestic market, causing the state to miss out on large sums of revenue.
The NBR officials said the state loses several thousand crores of taka for leakage of items from bonded warehouses.
