KARACHI: The Federal Board of Revenue after processing 34,118 duty drawback claims pertaining to Pakistan Automation Customs Clearance System (PaCCS) has paid Rs609.3 million to exporters.

The controversial auto-clearance system, owned by a Kuwait-based foreign firm Agility, started operations at Pakistan Customs in 2005 but was rolled-back in December 2011. Many exporters had been agitating since then for not having paid duty drawback claims. However in December last year the FTO directed the FBR to clear the outstanding duty drawback claims in two months time.

The FBR managed to process 34,118 or 94.8 per cent cases out of a total 36,000 pendency claims pertaining to PaCCS and after reconciling the duty drawback claims with the State Bank of Pakistan data in order to check genuineness of these claims paid Rs609.3 million to exporters by the end of last month.

Nevertheless, still fairly a large number of duty drawback cases could not be finalised on different grounds including those having legal issues and those with technical problems etc., while around 1,406 claims had been rejected.

The FBR is holding back around 2,234 duty drawback claims which have been processed but claimant’s bank address and other relevant information is missing hence the exporter(s) are untraceable.

After the rolling-back of PaCCS, the FBR has launched a new auto-clearance system, Web-based One Custom (WeBOC). On the directives of the FTO pendency cases of duty drawback under this new system were also taken up and processed.

Since the system was recently rolled-out, therefore the backlog or pendency of claims generally pertained to six months period. However, the FBR was duty bound to follow FTO directives and processed around 4,790 cases due for clearance under the new system.

Consequently, around Rs267.45 million were raised against 4,790 duty drawback claims but the FBR sanctioned and paid Rs228.42 million against 4,177 cases while the rest were held back on different grounds.