The National Board of Revenue (NBR) has locked over thousand Business Identification Numbers (BINs) for violating the conditions of bonded licence and other irregularities. The board has directed the customs offices to check whether raw materials have been imported and exported by the BIN holders at all. Bonded Warehouse facilities are extended to export-oriented industries for importing raw materials without paying any duty or taxes.
Due to smuggling of yarn and fabrics into the country and misuse of bonded warehouse facility, textile millers are losing business worth more than $6 billion annually in the domestic market. The sector is facing a survival crisis as the spinning and weaving mills are sitting on stockpiles of yarn due to lack of demand in the local market. Many businesses import raw materials and sell them in the local market. For the abuse of bonded warehouse facility and smuggling, country’s once-rising textile sector is now nose-diving.
We urge the government to seal the border to stop in smuggling of clothes and enforce strong monitoring to check misuse of bonded warehouse facility. If the textile millers run incurring loss, surely all the textile mills would be out of business with consequent rise of unemployment.
NBR officials said that the BINs have been locked due to non-compliance with bond licensed business conditions, failure to provide annual export-import data, non-cooperation with audit activities and misuse of the bond facility. Experts said that the businesses, misusing the bonded warehouse facility, must be punished because the special facility has been provided to the exporters to boost the sector not to destroy it. The NBR should strengthen its crime detection procedures including audit and capacity building. On the other hand, the Board should be careful so that the genuine exporters are not affected by action taken against dishonest traders.
The main cause of the problem, as pointed out, is the easy smuggling of yarn. The authorities cannot ignore one side of the problem and punish the other side. The situation is hopeless for the hopelessness of the authorities to know how to be effective in solving any problem. They seem to be good at abusing police power and court cases.
