THE Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) will fund the ISO-certification of the Bureau of Customs’ X-Ray Inspection Project, which is the agency’s first line of defense against tax cheats and smugglers.
Lourdes Mangaoang, BOC-XIP head, said JICA is seeking the International Organization for Standardization certification for the management of bureau’s 30 X-rays deployed in revenue ports nationwide.

The ISO certification, which will use 9001:2008 or certification for quality management systems, is
part of a much larger project called Philippine Customs Intelligence System (PCIS), Mangaoang said.

“JICA executives don’t want to release the figures for the ISO certification but it is part of the PCIS which entails [a funding] of billion pesos,” Mangaoang said.

“The PCIS represents JICA’s long-term commitment to support BOC’s human, system and infrastructure development through a sophisticated database information upgrade,” she said.

JICA has tapped the services of the ECC International Corp. to prepare the alignment of the BOC processes into ISO’s quality management systems.

ECCI chose the X-ray Project as the first of the Customs units to undergo ISO certification because its “existing processes are almost standardized, which means that only a little fine-tuning is needed to enable it to meet the requirement of ISO 9001certification,” Mangaoang said.

“It also helps that XIP personnel are already knowledgeable of the documentary requirements of ISO’s quality management systems,” the Customs official said.

When implemented, the system would allow a seamless sharing of internal information and intelligence held by different BOC units and divisions. The PCIS would enhance the integrity of BOC operations, promote efficiency in information sharing and analysis, institute improvement in risk management capability, facilitate generation of trade statistics and contribute to revenue generation, Mangaoang said.

Since May 2007, the agency’s x-rays enabled it to seize some P16 billion worth of goods.

Among the high-profile confiscations were the seizure of toluene and other precursor chemicals for shabu manufacture, guns and ammunitions, firecrackers, rice, onions and sugar, ukay-ukay and consumer items that infringe intellectual property rights.