Transform, not abolish Customs

The corrupt people inside the Bureau of Customs and their partners in crime outside of the bureau know the customs system very well. They are well-entrenched.

Simply abolishing the BOC and creating another agency that will just absorb the personnel of the BOC will just mean the corruption will stay because the bad are mixed in with the good.

Simply abolishing BOC does not mean no more shipments of drugs will slide through the corrupted system.

We need to transform the Bureau of Customs. What we need is an effective way to weed out the bad and solve other related problems along the way. No country can exist without a customs bureau. That is a necessity.

But there have been ways to separate bad assets and liabilities in past reform measures past Congresses have done.

For example, when the National Power Corporation was reformed, Congress created the Power Sector Assets and Liabilities Management (Psalm) Corporation. https://www.psalm.gov.ph/

When Congress reformed the Central Bank of the Philippines, Congress created a Board of Liquidators to dispose of assets and liabilities that burdened the Central Bank.

We also need to focus Customs on policy-making in very much the same way that the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS) and the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) are now regulating their respective jurisdictions in water and energy.

We need world-class customs, tariff, and border control systems. For these, we need to outsource from overseas because what we have here simply does not work they way we all want it to work. In other words, international competitive bidding of customs operations, and new agencies to handle tariff and border control.