Every year, our economy is losing a huge amount of revenue in form of taxes and duties due to the smuggling of automobile parts. The fact is that these smugglers usually work in collusion with government authorities to bring inferior or substandard parts into the country. This has severely damaged our auto parts industry and the usage of these inferior parts also affects the performance of the vehicles and endangers the safety of the automobile users.
Under the existing customs’ rules, automobile parts classification is one of the major issues that affects their import, since the duty is calculated on the basis of their weight rather than value. This creates a wide disparity in the valuation of imported parts and the net result is that local auto parts manufacturer lose their competitiveness. In order to curtail this menace, the government should implement realistic customs’ rules, take effective measures to completely block the smuggling of automobile parts and ensure the recovery of 16 percent of the sales tax from all automobile parts importers and sellers.
It is extremely important to enforce these measures in order to safeguard availability of genuine parts and also to protect our local auto parts industry.
FATIMA AKHTER,
Karachi, September 1.
