NPA reduces proposed late submission penalties

ALAN PEAT
IN AN unusual turnaround, the National Ports Authority (NPA) has made some changes to a set of rules after complaints from two representative user bodies. In December last year, the NPA announced that it intended, from January 1, to re-introduce penalty charges where cargo dues orders and manifests were submitted late - or not submitted. This, said Nisha Jones, the NPA’s GM for trade, logistics and corporate affairs, was after a three-year period in which the port authorities decided to discontinue the practice of charging penalties where documents were not submitted within the required timeframes. But the two private sector bodies, the SA Association of Freight Forwarders (Saaff) and the Association of Ships Agents and Brokers of SA (Asabosa), were immediately up in arms – both about the seriously limited timeframes, and what they described as “an onerous” penalty for non-submission within 30-days. This latter penalty was 100% of the cargo dues owed – effectively doubling the cargo dues. The problem with this, said Saaff’s Durban adviser, Dave Watts, was that it could hit both the innocent and the permanently guilty parties in the freight industry. “About 95% of the industry are compliant parties, and only about 5% deliberately refuse to pay the requisite cargo dues to the NPA,” he told FTW. “But this set of penalty rules penalises both the guilty and those who are normally compliant – but who may make the occasional error.” Saaff also thought that the non-submission penalty of 100% of the cargo dues owed was likely to encourage non-payment of cargo dues when submissions were seriously late for some reason. But, in this case, the NPA decided to discuss the issue, and called for a meeting with Saaff and Asabosa. The end result, said Jones, was that “the NPA agreed to review timeframes for submission and non-submission of documentation”. It also reduced the proposed penalty for late and non-submission of manifests from its original R5 000 per manifest to R1 000. This went part of the way to satisfying the private sector complaints about the penalty rulings, according to Watts. “Though the results of our discussions are not entirely satisfactory,” he said, “there has been substantial improvement in the matter of timing and the further period before penalty for non-submission becomes applicable.”