Nigeria’s Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Mrs. Zainab said yesterday that the Federal Government has granted N342billion waivers to importers in the last two years.
At the second phase of the one-day sensitization seminar on automated input duty exemption certificate held at the Nigeria Customs Training College, the minister urged the importers to take advantage of the automated import duty exemption certificate as it is part of measures aimed at promoting trade and enhance ease of doing business at the seaport.
She described the digitization process of import duty exemption as a means to tackle corruption, eliminate time waste and allow transparency.
Njenje Media news reports that the Minister represented by the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Finance, Mr Aliyu Ahmed, the minister added that the bottlenecks associated with import duty exemption and related sharp practices will eradicated by the new method.
In her words;
“approximately N341.94 billion worth of waivers was granted from August 2017 to August 2019. The scope of such request are expanding; hence the need to have in place modern technology to drive its administration.”
“The kernel of the mandate of the FMFBNP is the overall fiscal management of our national economy. One critical incentive which the FMFBNP provides, in line with extant laws, rules, regulation and executed international protocols, is the issuance of import/customs duties certificates to applicants. Up until March 2020, we processed the grant of the IBEC incentives manually. This process was quite cumbersome, tedious, time consuming, and was beset with undue human interface, with its attendant challenges,”
