URA Commissioner General, John R. Musinguzi
The Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) has given brokers operating as clearing and forwarding agents to redeem abandoned goods.
This follows an increase in fraudulent cases where people operating as brokers are importing goods and clearing them from the URA system on behalf of the goods’ actual owners.
URA says these people either under-declare or miss declare and when they are caught, they abandon the goods at the expense of their true owners.
This revelation came to light on Friday as URA with met importers after several complaints of missing goods.
“There are people who have been importing goods under their names and under their TINS when actually they are not the actual owners of those goods and that group of fraudulent people have been the same group that are so daring; they under-declare, or mis-declare the imported goods and when they are caught, because they are not stakeholders (the goods don’t belong to them), they abandon the goods and they let the importers be on their own. They start confusing them. URA has held your goods. The system is not on, and so on and so forth, and when they run out of excuses, then they start switching off their lines and changing,” URA Commissioner General, John R. Musinguzi, explained to the importers.
Recently, a youthful ‘importer’ trended on social media after he alleged that his goods had taken 117 days in URA custody.
“Tracing in our system, we could not trace any goods for this young man and even tracing him was difficult. But as we went down and interrogated this matter further and even contacted a number of business associations, we found out that there is a practice that has been happening where people masquerade as consolidators and import goods that belong to their importers which they don’t declare to us as goods that has been consolidated, and they are the same people when they are caught, they abandon those goods,” Musinguzi said.
In the Friday meeting between URA and a select group of importers and leaders of traders, it was agreed that the gaps in cargo consolidation be closed.
“Our SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) is that if goods don’t have any query, they are cleared out of our system within a day. Maximum is two days. So, for your cargo to be with us for 100 days that is a clear case of fraud,”Musinguzi added.
The Commissioner General shared the lessons and the adjustments agreed upon as well as a window of opportunity extended to the traders to pick their goods that were hitherto not declared by some consolidators as belonging to those traders.
“We are going to isolate brokers. I appeal to any importers who may have imported goods and have not been cleared in the last one month, say there is a problem. The person who imported the goods on your behalf on our system has been the problem, come to our office and redeem those goods. To the brokers, take advantage of the two-day window, cooperate with us so that we can clear goods and give them to the true owners and if that does not happen, then the law will take its course,” he said.
