Bureau of Customs (BOC) officials learned the hard way that it's the pet peeve of congressmen to appear unprepared in their panel investigations.

Visibly irate on Wednesday, Feb. 11 during a hearing of the House Committee on Ways and Means was Manila 3rd district Rep. Joel Chua ,who called out the BOC for not preparing any presentation on the large-scale tobacco smuggling in the country.

Worse, the BOC officials who attended the proceedings didn't bring any letter of excuse to explain the absence of their commissioner, Ariel Nepomuceno.

The Manila lawmaker claimed that the BOC’s seeming attitude toward the illicit tobacco trade was mirrored by its unpreparedness in the ways and means committee hearing.

“I notice most of the invited guests like the Department of Finance (DOF), the BIR (Bureau of Internal Revenue), so forth and so on eh dumating po sila dito prepared (they arrived prepared),” Chua said. “But, unfortunately, for the BOC aside from the fact wala po yung kanilang commissioner, wala po silang presentation (their commissioner is not here, they also don’t have a presentation).”

“It seems they are not prepared despite the more than five days of invitation. So, maybe that is precisely the reason bakit tayo nalulusutan ng mga smuggling. Mukha iyong simpleng ganito parang hindi nila napaghandaan (why smuggling gets through us. It seems they are unprepared even for something as simple as this),” he added.

Chua’s remarks came after Cagayan de Oro City 2nd district Rep. Rufus Rodriguez and committee chairman Marikina City 2nd district Rep. Miro Quimbo reprimanded BOC Deputy Commissioner for intelligence Romeo Allan Rosales for Nepomuceno’s absence.

According to Rodriguez, a formal letter from Nepomuceno is needed explaining why he could not attend the congressional inquiry.

“It is the rule of the committee in the event there is a reason that is beyond your control that you can't attend at the very least advise the committee because after all the committee is only here to help the agencies perform its job,” Quimbo said.

“But for the record, we didn't receive any letter coming from the commissioner although we were informally informed,” he added.

The Committee on Ways and Means held an inquiry into the large-scale tobacco smuggling in the country on Wednesday, where Quimbo described the worsening illicit tobacco trade as “the new POGO,” referring to the banned Philippine offshore gaming operations.

For his part, Rosales said that the hearing coincided with Nepomuceno’s role as the guest speaker at an Anti-Red Tape Authority (ARTA) event.

“Mr. Chair, my apologies for not being able to put up a presentation but we have here, we collated all the data regarding all smuggling operations, all apprehensions of cigarette and tobacco products and all the cases filed and the cases existing now,” he told the committee.