KINGSTON, Jamaica: The Opposition People’s National Party (PNP) is calling for the Major Organised Crime & Anti-Corruption Agency (MOCA) to immediately commence a probe into missing monies  from the Jamaica Customs Agency (JCA).

In a report tabled in Parliament this week, the Auditor General highlighted a financial exposure to the JCA of over $2B and uncollected revenues of over $664M.

 Describing the discoveries as “deeply troubling”, opposition spokesman on Finance Julian Robinson, in a statement on Thursday, said it is “critically important to determine whether or not this loss to the Government coffers is as a result of negligence or deliberate criminal conduct.”

The Auditor General’s Department carried out a special audit of the JCA’s private bonded warehouses and the bunkering operations and found violations of laws that resulted in billions of dollars of uncollected revenue.

According to the Auditor General Department’s official website, the audit covered the period 2016 to 2021 and was reportedly conducted based on allegations made by a “whistleblower under the Protected Disclosures Act regarding malpractice and deficiencies in the operation of its (the JCA) private bonded warehouses.”

The Auditor General’s Department said it “employed an agile approach to the audit and identified material concerns in the bunkering operations” and shared that whereas they could not confirm with certainty the allegations made by the whistle-blower, their review of JCA’s Private Bonded Warehouses and the Bunkering operations revealed “control breaches of the Customs and Special Economic Zones Acts, resulting in an estimated US$2.1 billion of financial exposure and $664.24 million in revenue remaining uncollected.”