Dear Editor,

It takes a taxpayer a long time to pay duties, taxes or administration charges at the Customs and Trade Administration Accounts Department situated at Lot 34 Main and Hope Streets. There are three cashiers, and transactions are done electronically with printed receipts being issued on the completion of a transaction. Following this, a taxpayer (importer or exporter) proceeds to the wharf or airport to receive or export cargo.

Basically, a taxpayer takes approximately ten minutes to complete a simple transaction of paying one hundred dollars ($100) for administration fees, or what is known to the taxpayer as a ‘free entry.’ However, let us say that you have to pay for a 1×40′ container of confectionery via cash, it can take approximately fifteen minutes.

For the past two months, taxpayers have had to endure a long wait to complete one transaction. At the moment it takes approximately thirty-five minutes to complete one transaction paying administration charges. It seems to be business as usual for both cashiers and the Total Revenue Integrated processing System (TRIPS) to ‘come up’ around 8:30 hrs every day. And this situation is compounded if one or more cashiers is absent.

So, using the above timeline only about 48 transactions are done daily if all three cashiers are working. Nevertheless, there are approximately 4000 occasional importers and exporters.

With the introduction of TRIPS in 2007, a number of problems kept surfacing from time to time. There was the complete crash of the system about eight months ago, whereby completed entries had to be pre-inputted into the system. Experts on the local area network have indicated to me that the present system is overloaded.

Apparently, more computers were added to the GRA network, but the corresponding bandwith and printing capacity remained the same.

It is my view that the communication department of the GRA should issue a press release on this situation as it is deteriorating daily. Apart from the stress to taxpayers, it has also resulted in want of entry, demurrage and timeline charges. If the electronic system fails they should switch to manual!

Yours faithfully,
R Thompson