THE Japan International Cooperation Agency (Jica) has set aside funds to help the Bureau of Customs (BOC) attain an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) certification for its X-ray Inspection Project (XIP), which has become a vital component of the agency’s enforcement measures.

However, lawyer Lourdes Mangaoang, chief of the Customs XIP, did not disclose the amount of the grant at Jica’s request.

“Jica executives don’t want to release the figures for the ISO certification but it is part of the Philippines Customs Intelligent System (PCIS) which involves a few billions of pesos [of funding],” Mangaoang said.  

“The PCIS represents Jica’s long-term commitment to support the BOC’s human, system and infrastructure development through a sophisticated database information upgrade. To be implemented with state-of the-art information technology, it would allow a seamless sharing of internal information and intelligence currently being held by different BOC units and divisions,” she said.

“When fully implemented, the PCIS would enhance the integrity of the BOC operation, promote efficiency in information sharing and analysis, institute improvement in our risk-management capability, facilitate generation of trade statistics and contribute to revenue generation,” Mangaoang added.

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

The X-ray Project was chosen by ECCI to be the first Customs unit 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 certification.”