By YOURI KEMP
Tribune Business Reporter
ykemp@tribunemedia.net
CUSTOMS’ system for electronically clearing goods has been down for the past week and is “holding up” The Bahamas’ import economy, brokers confirmed yesterday.
David Humes, owner/ operator of Integral Logistics, told Tribune Business that Click2Clear still is not working optimally and, as of yesterday, he was unable to clear any entries via the system. “This is a daily thing now,” he said. “It’s up, and I’m trying to do something now, and can’t get it done. There is nothing you can do except wait.”
The Click2Clear system has been malfunctioning for the entire week, with the Customs Department previously telling this newspaper that it is a software-related problem that has to be dealt with by the developer. Mr Humes said hat while systems such as Click2Clear can become inoperable, or begin to lag, due to lack of space on the database or cloud, these things should have been “factored in” when it was implemented.
“The people who designed this should have been able to anticipate stuff like this. I have things I need to clear and this is holding me up,” he added. “I had one other shipment I was able to clear away, but that was two days ago. But nothing is straight. I have to keep going back at it when the system comes back up. This has been a huge waste of time.
“I want the large firms like Sysco Bahamas, AML Foods and Super Value to put some pressure on the Bahamas Customs Department and tell them they need to get this thing working because they can’t do their work on time. That’s big time revenue, because small players like us, Customs really isn’t checking for.”
Another Customs broker, speaking on condition of anonymity, also said Click2Clear has not been working for the past week. They have had to halt goods clearance and focus on other parts of their business, only to come back and the system still is not functioning. “I have not uploaded an entry for the entire day,” they said.
“The Department of Customs don’t seem to know how to manage the Click2Clear, but they want us to buy an integrated software to upload our entries into it. This entire Click2Clear experiment has been a failure from day one. The Department of Customs clearly doesn’t have the technical capacity to roll the system out in a concerted manner.”
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