Govt moves fast to appoint PSI audit agency to prevent revenue leakage

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S M Jahangir
The government has moved to appoint an international audit agency to detect irregularities of pre-shipment inspection (PSI) companies to prevent drainage of revenues worth billions, officials said Sunday.
The move comes weeks after the caretaker government appointed four PSI companies for a tenure up to December 2009, despite allegations that they are involved in under-valuation and false declaration of goods imported to the country.
The National Board of Revenue (NBR) has already invited bids from international firms to audit the PSI companies and its technical committee would sit today (Monday) to scrutinise the offers, an official said.
After evaluating the offers, the NBR will select a firm within a couple of weeks and then send the proposal to the advisory committee on public purchase for final selection.
"We want to appoint an audit firm as soon as possible. The allegations against the PSI companies are serious and the NBR wants to audit their irregularities," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
PSI companies have been operating in the country since 1999 to inspect imported goods before their shipment to Bangladesh. The aim is to stop leakage of customs duties worth billions of Taka.
But since then, PSI companies' operation has become controversial, with some importers and officials accusing the firms of wrong HS code classification, under-valuation and mis-declaration of imported goods.
Early this year, the NBR cancelled agreement with a Switzerland-based PSI company after detecting irregularities in valuation of imported luxury cars.
NBR officials said the PSI audit agency would conduct post clearance audit and verify a maximum 20 per cent of inspection reports submitted by the PSI firms per month.
Besides, the audit agency will investigate country of origin of the imported goods if necessary to ascertain the veracity of the PSI reports.
The agency will also train the NBR officials about pre-shipment audit system, risk management, commercial forgery, fraud prevention and enhance their skills through transfer of technology.
The finance adviser has already said that the government would discontinue the PSI systems after the expiry of their contracts in December 2009, before which the customs department would be readied to conduct inspection.