She was chairing a workshop jointly organised by APTMA and Collectorate of Customs at the North Zone office of the Association on Tuesday. Collector Customs Sambarial Nayar Shafiq and Additional Collector Farah Farooq also accompanied her on the occasion.
Chairman APTMA North Zone Hamid Zaman, Senior Vice Chairman Kamran Arshad and Secretary General Raza Baqir welcomed the team. Technical staff from member mills was also present to attend the workshop.
Collector Customs Lahore said all steps are being taken to promote the EFS, as it is very close to our hearts. She said the prime objective of the Scheme is to streamline the exports in order to earn precious foreign exchange for the country.
According to her, the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) would ensure all measures to make the EFS user friendly for the exporters community.
“The queries raised in today’s workshop would help in shooting out the discrepancies in the scheme,” she stated.
She said the Board has also introduced barter scheme to facilitate exporters. Under this scheme, she said, the exporters would require neither letter of credit nor banking channel to export their shipments. The exporters would come out of the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) regime, she added.
Earlier, Additional Collector Farah Farooq made a detailed presentation on the scheme, highlighting the accomplishments made by the department so far. She also pointed out that the department has set up help desks to facilitate exporters under the EFS.
Speaking on the occasion, Senior Vice Chairman APTMA Kamran Arshad said the EFS period is not yet reflected in the system, which requires attention of the department without delay. He also spoke on how the department should also consider to discontinue manual submissions and approvals to mitigate delays due to parallel systems of electronic and manual submissions. He proposed that the system should adjust devaluation fluctuations in case it is more than 5%.
In addition, he highlighted the valuation issues regarding local sale of permissible waste and stressed on amicable settlement to relieve exporters once and for all. He also demanded an expeditious implementation of change request forms to minimise difficulties for exporters and proposed monthly meetings between the two sides to resolve procedural lapses in the scheme.
Chairman North Zone Hamid Zaman thanked the visiting Customs high-ups and proposed another workshop right after Eid holidays to overcome operational issues in the scheme, as highlighted by the technical staff of member mills.