Recently the faceless assessment practice were launched by Government of India in Indian Custom Departments for import goods on pan India basis.
After launching of the Faceless assessment the custom brokers or any Importers do not have any access or knowledge about their Bill of entries, i.e. where they have been forwarded for assessment and which officer is assessed or raised the query in such shipments.
Whereas in earlier practice, if a query regarding any discrepancies were issued, the same has been explained in person by custom brokers/importers to custom officers without delaying and was very short process.
But now there are several custom brokers and importers facing problems in a very regular queries raised by custom officers from different custom stations, its a ” The value declared are low as per contemporaneous import”.
Now there are no such rule or practice for the customs where they must justify & explain the importers about their queries & the contemporaneous import details, on the basis of which they hold the assessment & demand approval for increasing the value of imported goods.
There are one sided practice, where the consignees/importers who are the maximum tax payers in the country has to provide the documentary evidence, but they don’t have fair right to ask the custom officers about the documentary support regarding their queries on same date, so they can get to know that query raised by officer is as per data they have, so they can study the provided data and explain their part.
If this practice allows then it will be a game changer in transparency between customs and trade and help to reduce the corruptions, It will create the trust between the department & trade.
As per the importers the value of the goods they import are based on the different factors, such as current raw material price, size of order, quality, port and place of delivery , payment mode, long trade relations with supplier, credit terms etc.
Now there are possibilities that the value of same product from same seller can be different for multiple buyers in same country or location, depend on the factors as we discussed earlier. So how can the one buyer or seller can be corelate with other buyer or seller without knowing the actual facts.
The permanent and transparent solution needed to avoid the misuses of rights and power by several Government departments.
