From blood to worse

To us ordinary folk, Varanus Bitatawa is the scientific name of the native monitor lizard known as bayawak, which environmental groups declared to be close to extinction.

In the Bureau of Customs (BOC) under our leader Benigno Simeon, aka BS, the term bayawak could also be a codename of sorts for some magical use by smuggling syndicates.

According to rumors, the term never referred to any actual “blood” relative of people in the Aquino (Part II) administration.

It was just that the group behind bayawak supposedly controlled what already became some highly sophisticated yet organized smuggling operations, applying an effective stranglehold on the BOC.

To heighten public awareness of the persistent smuggling problem, the Federation of Philippine Industries (FPI) recently launched a movement called Fight IT, with “IT” standing for “illicit trade,” which was just a nice way of saying “smuggling.”

Our dear leader, BS, threw a tantrum about smuggling when he talked about corruption in the entire BOC in his famous kapal ng mukha Sona in 2013.

Still, he forgot to tell the whole nation at that time that the problem of smuggling actually turned from bad to worse during his term.

Based on estimates made by Ernesto Ordoñez, a former Cabinet member and another columnist in this section, the amount of foregone government revenues due to smuggling ballooned from P140 billion in 2010 to P230 billion in 2013, up by about P90 billion.

Can you imagine what kind of infrastructure the P230 billion the amount lost could build to help solve the hellish traffic in all urban centers in the country?

It seemed that Ordoñez collated the country’s import figures as reported by the BOC, and compared them with figures on export to the Philippines by other countries, based on UN Comtrade Statistics.

Ordoñez found out the BOC import figures were always much lower than the UN Comtrade export figures, and called the difference as the “smuggling rate.”

The rate stood at 6 percent in 2005, but by the end of the cute administration of former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the rate soared to about 26 percent.

Perhaps the figures could serve as proof to rumors that somebody big at the Palace then controlled the smuggling operations in the BOC.

Question: Did the bayawak system of today inherit the “technology” perfected in the BOC by somebody big at the Palace under Gloriaetta?

Under the Aquino (Part II) administration, the smuggling rate even went up from 28 percent in 2010 to some 35 percent in 2013.

Another bad news: Philippine imports almost doubled from 2005 to 2013, which meant the rise in government revenue loss was much higher than the rise in smuggling rate.

Thus, based on the Ordoñez compilation, government revenue loss climbed from P18 billion in 2005 to some P230 billion in 2013.

Just how well organized the smuggling syndicates have become could be gleamed from the amazing number of importers “accredited” by the BOC. At one time, the number was 13,000.

The business sector suspected, and rightly so, that a good percentage of the “accredited” importers were fly-by-night firms acting as a front for the syndicates.

In an effort to help the good guys in the BOC fight the syndicates, the FPI tried to track down those bogus firms, painstakingly checking the information in their incorporation papers.

But the FPI, even with the help of the good guys in the BOC, could only do so much intelligence work. In the end, the government had to implement measures to address such smuggling modus operandi.

For one, the number of BOC-accredited importers has dropped to some 8,000, which—in fairness—was a credit to the Aquino (Part II) administration.

It used to be that only the BOC was involved in the accreditation process. Now, the importer must also be accredited by the Bureau of Internal Revenue, thus needing to submit documents such as income tax returns.

Let us pray that fly-by-night importers would find it impossible to fake their ITRs.

Another change implemented by the Aquino (Part II) administration involved the so-called post entry audit, through which the BOC could still run after importers way after their shipments were released by the BOC, as a safeguard against collusion between importer and BOC personnel. The problem was only the BOC itself could do the audit.

Nowhere in the world could you find such a stupid system in which you audited yourself!

To correct the flaw, the Aquino (Part II) administration took away the post entry audit as one of the jobs of the BOC, giving it to an outside unit in the Department of Finance.

There—at least somebody in the administration could come up with working solutions to the problem of massive systematic smuggling.

What remains to be done now is, well, to actually implement the measures, if it is not too much to ask of the administration.

Also, the prognosis in the business sector was that those corrective measures could hardly become effective, unless our dear BS would take action against the scourge called bayawak in the BOC.

Really, somebody in this administration must dare to challenge the monster.