Letter to CCRA Assistant Commissioner regarding..
31 October 2002
Letter to CCRA Assistant Commissioner regarding AMPS
The following letter from CSCB President Carol West was sent to Assistant Commissioner Denis Lefebvre on 28 October.
CSCB members are encouraged to continue to provide feedback to the national office regarding their experiences with AMPS. For this purpose, you may e-mail us at [email protected], or complete the AMPS monitoring form for NPAs available on our web site, at http://www.cscb.ca/forms/ampsinfo_oct02.htm, or provide commentary on our AMPS message board, at http://www.cscb.ca/amps/Default.asp.
Dear Mr. Lefebvre;
Following the implementation of AMPS on October 7th, and with feedback from members involved in our AMPS Monitoring Project, the CSCB has identified several issues which require your urgent attention.
Our first concern is with Contravention C274. On October 9th, just two days after the implementation of AMPS, we wrote to Ken McCarthy with detailed commentary about the business issues surrounding Customs Notice 367. We urged that this contravention be zero-rated until these business issues could be resolved. We have received no response. Since that time, we have received calls and messages from a number of our members who confirm that the release of goods is being delayed because of C274 – that is, because of the potential for a penalty. Carriers are reluctant to provide an ETA and are not delivering manifests until the goods have arrived. This is especially true in the port of Montreal for marine and air carriers.
In addition, we have received a number of specific comments with respect to C274, including the following:
“My clients received two penalties under C274 for a total of $2,000 this week. I am certainly not proud of this fact as it resulted from clerical errors of my staff (choosing the wrong service option). I find this extremely punitive for a clerical error. A $100 penalty would have corrected the non-compliance, which CCRA so desires. Also, the importers received the NPAs but were not the ones who committed the infraction – even though I will be paying these, the importer has a mark against his/her record and would be subject to a second-level offence next. . . .
In summary, I believe the penalty assessment under C274 is extreme and punitive. Don’t get me wrong, I still agree with the whole concept of AMPS and even C274, but I am beginning to realize that its objective is punishment over rehabilitation. . .”.
In this instance, the broker did not see any of these penalties during the grace period – and because the list of NPAs issued during the grace period was not broken down by region, we have no way of knowing whether any NPAs for contravention 274 were issued in his region. This is not an acceptable situation.
A second situation brought to our attention, and to the attention of your officials, is the assessment of a first-level penalty of $1,000 under C274 where the value of the goods is less than that amount. Again, this was a situation in which a clerical error was made, in which the penalty is excessive, especially relative to the value of the goods.
We recommend that CCRA consider, especially in these early days following implementation of AMPS, adjusting the penalty levels where problems such as these have been identified. Indeed, if the objective of AMPS is to encourage compliance, there should be flexibility to continue to issue first level penalties for an indefinite period of time. We also believe that officers should have flexibility to apply the lesser of penalty amounts, rather than be required to issue penalties which fall into the “whichever is greater” amount.
We would also like to express our concern with Contravention 336, failure to pay duty. During the grace period, we understand there were 36 NPAs issued for this contravention – but, once again, we have no way of knowing where these were issued. Yet, it has come to our attention that, during the month of September, 245 letters were sent by the GTA Commercial Division to importers with a “record of non-co