The Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) has stated that it will keep using its “huge stick” against officers who are discovered to be engaging in dishonest actions.
The current administration has zero tolerance for corruption, according to the National Public Relations Officer of the agency, Deputy Comptroller Timi Bomodi, who was speaking to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja.
According to him, the degree of responsibility determined the type of punishment meted out to police who had been found responsible over time.
He claims that the service will keep weeding out “bad eggs” until the system has been as thoroughly cleaned as possible.
Bomodi claimed that policemen who had been investigated and found to be guilty over time had either been suspended, demoted, required to retire, or summarily terminated.
“Under this administration and retired Col. Hameed Ali’s direction, we have witnessed the strict application of established norms in the military.
As a result, he said, “we have been able to reduce officer misconduct, which has had a significant influence on the level of income creation.”
Regarding further measures taken to combat corruption, Bomodi stated that the service was aiming to ensure complete automation of the service.
He said that Trade Modernisation Limited and the service already had a concession agreement in place to aid in the automation process.
The concession agreement has 20 years, and each of those years has specific deliverables attached to it. When you refer to pre-clearance, clearance, and post-clearance as being fully automated, you are referring to all of our services.
“You’re proposing to introduce some facilities that were not previously available.
According to him, modernization will combine all of our operations into a single platform to make it simple for officers to access information from anywhere in the nation.
According to the spokesman, real-time monitoring of transactions enabled by automation made it simple to identify any form of breach.
According to him, Huawei, one of the top Information and Communication Technology (ICT) companies, will be giving technical help given the degree of infrastructure and technical know-how needed for the project.
“The entire modernization process depends on ICT, and Huawei has demonstrated their ability to carry out this project.
“With the automation process, I can acquire any information I need, like news from Lagos, at the touch of a button.
We are already in the process of transitioning as officers receive local and international training and as some of the equipment starts to arrive.
“We are employing several layers of interaction to obtain data, which is a terrific aspect of the modernization process.”
Bomodi stated that among the levels of interaction it will use to obtain data include geospatial data, data from drones, and data from body cameras.
In addition to eradicating corruption, he said that complete automation would increase revenue collection and ensure more secure borders.
Bomodi claimed that in addition to penalizing negligent officers and achieving complete automation, the welfare of the personnel had significantly improved to act as an incentive.
He claimed that policemen could speak to the fact that compensation was far better than it once was.
With such compensation, he claims, officers who continue to engage in dishonest behavior do so at their own risk because they will be disciplined if discovered. (NAN)
