MANILA: President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. has sought better data sharing among government agencies to fight smuggling and make sure that the ease of doing business is unhampered, saying bureaucracy reforms are needed.
Malacañang issued the statement on Saturday following the president’s meeting with his Private Sector Advisory Council.
According to the statement, Marcos noted that businessmen have “major complaints” about the “inefficiency of the country’s airports and seaports.”
Among the measures to address this, the Palace said is to delineate functions of agencies or establish new ones.
“One of the recommendations raised was opening up the database to the Bureau of Customs (BOC) and to the Department of Agriculture (DA) to ensure the efficient sharing of information,” the statement read.
The current systems in place are “quite ineffective,” said Marcos, given that paper trails have made it difficult to go after smugglers.
“To be brutally frank about it, we have a system but they are not working. The smuggling here in this country is absolutely rampant. So it does not matter to me how many systems we have in place, they do not work,” Marcos told members of his advisory body.
“So we really have to find something else. We cannot continue to depend on these systems,” he added.
These problems can cause problems in the business sector, he said.
The Bureau of Customs this week said they were able to confiscate P1.9 billion worth of smuggled agricultural products last year.
The bureau was also able to seize up to P600 million worth of onions, so far, as its prices continue to soar in several wet markets.
At least P19 million worth of smuggled sugar was seized at the Manila International Container Port (MICP), the Department of Agriculture (DA) reported .
Agriculture Assistant Secretary for Inspectorate and Enforcement James Layug said the contraband cargo was discovered on January 11 in five shipping containers.
Layug said the shipment was declared as insulators, surge arresters, slippers outsoles, and styrene butadiene rubber.
The shipment had been ordered held last November 29 and inspected by a team from the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG), Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA), Customs Anti-Illegal Drug Task Force (CAIDTF), Bureau of Plant Industry (BPI), and Customs Intelligence and Investigation Services (CIIS).
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