ISLAMABAD: The Federal Board of Revenue has directed the Director General Post Clearance Audit (PCA) to conduct an audit of GB customs Collectorate for the last three years.
Sources said that the audit could bring out the method and magnitude of massive revenue losses caused in the GB customs allegedly by a principal appraiser Raja Waseem Ahmad under the alleged patronage of DG custom intelligence, Islamabad.
The GB customs scam remained in news during the past weeks after the former collector GB customs collectorate Nisar Ahmad who served there for about three months had pointed at a cartel of senior custom officers allegedly involved in corrupt practice of money making through clearing high value imported goods at throw away and nominal duty and taxes and charging bribe money on each import container as a price of their misuse of powers and the resulting heavy revenue loss on each container.
This cartel of senior custom officers allegedly amassed massive amounts of bribe money every month on the clearance of around ninety containers a month in the GB customs collectorate.
Sources said that Chairman FBR had asked Member Customs operations Mukarram Jah Ansari to probe the former Collector’s startling disclosures and revelations about the quantum of corruption in the FBR’s customs field formations.
The chairman FBR, an IRS officer and largely unaware of the deeper tricks of money making in the custom department under him, may be feeling assured that truth about GB customs scam will now rise to the surface once he he has set the member customs operations himself to the task of unearthing and finding out the truth in the alleged revenue loss scam However, sources added, the chairman FBR may not be knowing that FBR has used it’s PCA department in the past as an instrument to white wash and bury the massive revenue losses caused in the customs scams perpetrated by senior custom officer in their lust for leaving each other behind in money making and richness.
In the process of realising these ulterior motives, custom officers have been using PCA allegedly to buy time, to let the customs scams evaporate from the public memory and to finally use the PCA to whitewash the scam.
A case in point is FBR’s direction to PCA to investigate and audit the high profile and a massive revenue loss scam in Faisalabad customs allegedly perpetrated by ex DG custom intelligence Shoukat Ali and his team of senior custom officers.
The PCA perhaps for the first time resisted its misuse and brought forth the magnitude of revenue loss caused in the scam and the custom officers who had caused that loss. Sources disclosed that FBR came down on some junior custom officials with a heavy hand and suspended a custom official who had laid that scam bare right on the highway.
Interestingly, FBR did nothing on PCA’s revealing report on the Faisalabad customs scam rather FBR reportedly allowed the incriminated custom officers to steal away the report from FBR records.
Sources close to development told this scribe that senior custom officials are trying their best to make a deal with the whistle blower as they think that Nisar Ahmad’s disclosures regarding shelter and backing of money maker principal appraiser Waseem Ahmad from DG custom intelligence in the customs frauds in GB customs had put the senior customs officer’ career at peril and some senior custom officers in FBR wanted to avoid this eventuality.
Sources said, the whistle blower has been assured he will be given a good posting after a few months and the whistle blower has reportedly agreed in return that he will now stop washing the dirty linen in public.
Sources said that it was in this context that PCA will be misused once again to silence the noise about custom officers’ lust for and their magnitude of money making at the cost of massive losses of government revenue.
It will be no different this time as many earlier revenue loss scams in the custom department have seen the same fate.
