The International Customs day is commemorated every january 26 to raise awareness on the importance of customs authorities and their role in the smooth movement of goods across the borders.
The day also presents opportunity for the service to reflect on the condition within which it’s officers perform their statutory responsibilities, challenges and relationships with stakeholders including government agencies.
At a ceremony put together by the NCS to observe the day in Abuja, the Comptroller General of the NCS, Col Hammed Ali RTD said the theme of the celebration, ” Scaling up customs digital transformation by embracing a data culture and building a data ecosystem” was chosen to entrench a data based culture and knowledge driven ecosystem.
He said the trend is already paying off through the service digitalize platforms with trade transactions peaked at over 850,000 resulting to about 2.28 trillion naira revenue collection for the government in 2021.
Col Ali also reflected on other milestone achievements of the service through it’s integrated custom information service, saying plans are on to ensure the digitalizaton of it’s service delivery processes.
The NCS boss further listed media criticism, attempt by hawkers to compromise the integrity of the service IT system and attacks from armed smugglers as some of the challenges faced by the NCS in 2021.
