Customs penalties continue to irk agents

Alan Peat CUSTOMS APPEARS to have toned down its over-exuberant imposition of penalties for clerical errors, but forwarders are still not happy. In September last year new penalty guidelines were introduced and the practice of “counter rejects” (where customs officials handed back documents with clerical errors, and told forwarders to get them corrected) was abandoned. The new procedure required agents to pay the penalty (no matter how high) first, then appeal. “Obviously customs have listened to us,” said Len Joshua, chairman of the SA Association of Freight Forwarders (SAAFF) in Port Elizabeth, who suggested at the time that forwarders should have the right to appeal first, then pay up if they lost. “No weird and wonderful penalties have been reported to me in recent months,” he told FTW. “Our brief to our members was to talk to customs if they thought that a penalty was unfair. A lot of them did - and it seems to have worked.” However, Gavin Cooper, chairman of SAAFF in the Western Cape, does not feel that the problem has disappeared - although he did agree that the attitude to penalties did appear to vary in the different customs centres. He’s not talking multi-thousand as before, but still describes some of the penalties as “unreal” and also “not related to the nature of the offence”. An example he cited was data capture errors - like a mistaken zero being included in a code - facing a penalty of between R200 and R500. “That’s ridiculous for a clerical error,” Cooper added, while calling for the re-instatement of the “counter reject” for such mistakes. On a national basis, Edward Little, executive director of SAAFF, commented: “The penalty provisions are presently subject to review.” He did however, also agree that “the ridiculously high” penalties were still being imposed. His suggestion in such cases is that forwarders facing high penalties should appeal - and take it through procedure that way. But the case of the penalty fitting the crime still remains an issue between SAAFF and customs. “The old notion of rejecting documentation because of some minor flaw (“counter rejects”) seems to have disappeared, and been replaced by a need to impose a penalty,” Little told FTW, “sometimes at an exorbitant level, while at no loss to the fiscus.” SAAFF has stipulated that a distinction should be made. “We have suggested that customs should distinguish between those situations where there is NO intent to defraud and no loss to the fiscus - and those where it would seem that there is intent to defraud,” Little said. “Also, where an appeal is lodged, if it is rejected, customs should make a full disclosure of the grounds on which it was rejected.” There is also a basic principle behind the SAAFF objection to many of the penalties. Said Little: “Where customs has the name and address of the importer, the penalty should not be laid against the agent - who is only acting on behalf of the principal - but should rather be laid against that principal.”