Importers in a bind as sample goods pile on Ctg custom's lone chemist

The chemical laboratory of Chattogram Custom House, the country's largest customs station, has been reduced to a skeleton crew – a lone assistant chemical examiner and a few helping hands – as the lab nears almost a year without any full-time chemical examiner leading to a backlog of import product samples.

There are only five people working in the lab against 15 positions. The 10 vacant positions include two chemical examiner posts, three deputy chief chemical examiner positions and five assistant chemical examiner positions.

Delayed lab report of import samples is extending the goods release timeframe and as a result the importers are taking financial losses on top of the harassment getting the imports released.

The last Chemical Examiner Abdul Hannan retired in February 2022 and since then Assistant Chemical Examiner Md Helal Hasan has been operating the lab with a handful of support staff. The lab receives some 200 samples of various products including 100 fruit samples for testing and the understaffed team of the lone assistant chemist manages to deliver reports for 60% of the samples.

As a result, the backlog of samples pending lab-test keeps piling on.

Importers get to keep the import goods-laden containers in the port yard free of charge for the first four days. After that, each TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit) container costs $6 per day for the first week. The charge per container doubles to $12 per day all through the second week while from the third week onwards the charge doubles again to $24.

The delay in getting lab test reports often leads to perishable items like vegetables and fruits to rot causing big financial losses to the importers on top of the additional storage charges they had to bear up until that.

"Imported goods are stuck at the port for a week to fifteen days due to the delay in the chemical test report. This suffering is due to the shortage of customs inspectors and importers are enduring its brunt for almost a year now," Kazi Mahmud Imam Bilu, general secretary of Chattogram Custom's Clearing and Forwarding Agents Association, told The Business Standard.

 "Importers are the ones paying for the failure of customs," he added.

Owner of Al Madina Trading Nazim Uddin, a raw product importer, said the businessmen have been demanding to fully equip the Chattogram Custom House lab for a long time.

"The shortage of examiners is extending the time frame for tests, which should be done in a day or two, to seven days. This in turn is prolonging the goods release process," he said, adding many opts to have samples tested from Dhaka and it also takes almost two weeks for the report to reach the importers.

In 2020, the then Customs Commissioner Mohammad Fakhrul Alam wrote to the chairman of the National Board of Revenue (NBR) to increase the manpower at the chemical lab. The letter said only two examiners were conducting chemical tests on a large number of products, which is hampering productivity and causing delay in clearing import goods.

It also pointed out that the two examiners, who were working at the time, were very close to their retirement. Then the Chemical Examiner Abdul Hannan retired, but no new chemists have been appointed yet. 

Commenting on the situation, Chattogram Custom House Commissioner Md Faizur Rahman essentially said the same thing that the NBR have been informed about the overall manpower crisis including the shortage of chemical examiners.

"We will, once again, bring the matter to their attention," he added.