The Comptroller-General of Customs, Col. Hameed Ali (retd), has said that the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), generated N720billion in 2016.

He made this known while defending the budget of the service before the Senate Committee on Customs, Excise and Tariff yesterday in Abuja.

It was a subsidiary budget defence for NCS as a revenue-generating agency of government.

He said the approved revenue target for 2016 was N937 billion comprising of N862 billion for the federation and N75 billion for non-federation.

He added that the service, however, collected total revenue of N720.7 billion or 77 per cent during the period.

He stressed that the revenue collected was with a negative variance of N 216.6 billion or 23 per cent when compared with the target for the year.

The comptroller-general noted that the revenue performance of N720.7 billion in 2016 had a negative variance of N13.6 billion or 1.9 per cent when compared with N734 billion collected in 2015.

“During the period under review the service also collected the sum of N177.93 billion as VAT on imports thereby bringing the total collection to N898.67 billion.

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“The shortfall in the performance is due to the fact that no revenue was collected on luxury items and polished rice levy because of lack of legal backing to enforce collection of luxury items and no importation of polished rice.

”Also responsible is restriction of 41items from accessing foreign exchange at official window as well as high exchange rate of naira against other foreign currencies increased the tax base of goods imported and reduced volume of trade.

”The scanners at the various Customs scanning sites are not functioning. This factor has adversely contributed to the services inability to carry out effective examination for selected consignments.

”Presently, only two commodities, cigarette and alcoholic beverages are under excise control and this did not help in the achievement of the N63.8 billion excise revenue target in the 2016 budget.

“The porous nature of the nation’s borders encourage smuggling activities and this constitutes some reasonable setbacks in the 2016 revenue collected,” he said.

He said the service had an approved budget expenditure of N81billion for 2016, out of which N53.5 billion or 66 per cent was received from federation and non-federation accounts.

He said of the amount, N35.60 billion representing 81 per cent was used for personnel cost, N4.98 billion, representing 11 per cent, for overhead cost and N3.35 billion for capital cost.

He said there was an unutilised balance of N9. 6billion representing 17.9 percent, out of which N8.5billion was intervention fund released to the service and dedicated to completion of its corporate headquarters.