Philippine economy

Outdated Customs law drags PH competitiveness – Biazon

Lean Santos

This is AI generated summarization, which may have errors. For context, always refer to the full article.

Customs commissioner Ruffy Biazon stresses the need for a new Customs law for the Philippines to climb up the competitiveness ladder

TIME TO UPDATE. Customs commissioner Ruffy Biazon stresses the need to update the country's customs law. Photo from BOC's website

MANILA, Philippines – The existing Customs law, promulgated in 1957, needs to be updated for the Philippines to go up the competitiveness ladder in the coming years, according to Bureau of Customs commissioner Ruffy Biazon.

Some provisions in the Tariff and Customs Code of the Philippines (TCCP) are no longer aligned with the current tariff structure, dragging the country’s competitiveness, Biazon stressed at a forum called Aid for Trade on Friday, March 22.

“We have antiquated policies. Despite the surge and prevalence of technology, our policies remained the same. It’s dragging the country’s competitiveness,” he said.

In the 2012 Global Competitiveness Report released by the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Philippines ranks 65th out of 145 countries surveyed. In Southeast Asia, the country is still in the bottom half of the spectrum, ranking 6th out of the 8 included nations in the index.

Due to this, Biazon said that there’s still a lot of work to do and that the passing of the new Customs Law is key.

“With the old law, the Philippines is not compliant with international standards on customs administration. We need to pass the Customs and Tariff Modernization Bill to address these problems,” he said.

The proposed Customs and Tariff Modernization Bill is an improvement to the TCCP’s provisions that, according to Biazon, are already inappropriate.

The same provisions implemented in 1957, the time the law was passed, are still in use today and are not optimal despite several policies passed amending the law, particularly Presidential Decree (PD) 1464 in 1978 and Republic Act (RA) 9135 in 2000.

Biazon said that the passing of the modernization bill hopes to change the system and rejuvenate the corruption-ridden government agency.

Aside from issues of corruption, the Bureau of Customs is also ridden with leadership problems.

Since the 6-year rein of former commissioner Guillermo Parayno Jr in the Ramos administration, the agency has since seen an extensive leadership turnover with many commissioners only serving for several months to a year.

This is confirmed by Biazon, saying that the instability of leadership affects the long term plans of the bureau.

“Leadership is constantly changed, reforms are not made, hence, momentums are stopped. There’s no sustainability in terms of reforms.” – Rappler.com

Add a comment

Sort by

There are no comments yet. Add your comment to start the conversation.

Summarize this article with AI

How does this make you feel?

Loading
Download the Rappler App!