On Thursday, March 16, in Abuja, The House of Representatives has instructed its Committee on Customs and Excise to probe the failure of the Nigerian Customs Service, NCS, to auction seized items.
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This was after the adoption of a motion on the “Need to Investigate the Failure of the Nigerian Customs Service to Auction Confiscated Goods’’.
Prestige Ossy, representing Abia-PDP, who sponsored the motion, said that ban on the auction of goods confiscated by the NCS, led to the forfeiture of such items to the Federal Government.
Ossy expressed worry that since the commencement of the ban in 2015, “it had resulted to the proliferation of seized goods at various formations of the Nigerian Custom Services’’.
Ossy said that goods confiscated in large numbers from various parts of the country includes consumables, vehicles, clothing materials and containers of assorted household items.
The rep said that rather than auctioning the seized items which worth billions of naira, the Customs service left them to depreciate.
He said: “most of these goods, especially the vehicles with Duty Paid Value (DPV) worth over N6 billion, are rapidly dilapidating and depreciating in value.
“The Customs service will eventually spend huge amount of money in disposing them when it ought to have generated huge revenue for the government by auctioning them before they weather away.’’
He said that the website established in 2015, for an auction sale, annouced by NCS, had not materialised for over two year now.
“The failure to auction goods in its custody had denied the Federal Government over N1 trillion which ought to accrue to it from the auctioning of those goods,’’ Ossy said.
Upon the adoption of the motion, the house passed it to the Committee on Customs and Excise to investigate and come back with a report in eight weeks time.
