Customs on hiring spree to ease manpower crunch

The Commissioner of Customs and Excise, Louise Ho, on Saturday said authorities were aiming to hire another 290 members of staff this year to address a continued manpower shortage, adding efforts would be ramped up to conduct recruitment exercises on the mainland and overseas. The new recruitment drive would include hiring 90 superintendents and 200 officers, she added. Speaking on a Commercial Radio programme, the customs chief noted that her department has seen positive results from recruitment drives north of the border, with many applicants Hong Kong students who are studying on the mainland. "Because many Hong Kong students studying on the mainland are also among our recruitment targets, so over a short period of time, we've been to five cities, where many Hong Kong students have gone for their studies, including some of the big cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou,” she said. Ho added many of the Hong Kong students studying on the mainland were interested in disciplined services work, and applications for superintendent roles surged by 70 percent last year, while those for officers roles increased by 20 percent. Separately, Ho said officers seized 652 million sticks of illicit cigarettes last year, which was more than the number seen a year earlier and reflected renewed efforts by authorities to deal with illicit cigarettes. However, she stressed that such an increase did not necessarily mean that more illicit cigarettes were now entering the local market, as many of them were for re-export. She added authorities would do more to combat the distribution of leaflets that are suspected to have promoted illicit cigarettes at the community level. "Such leaflets - whether it’s about illicit cigarettes or it’s just some advertisements for cigarettes, if you are openly showing or distributing such ads, it’s illegal in Hong Kong.” “We at customs will also follow up on information from such leaflets to see if it’s about illicit cigarettes, and if it is, we’ll conduct undercover operations to strictly enforce the law... to terminate the services of the telephone numbers shown [from the leaflets],” she said. Hong Kong’s first female chief of customs also said that cargo inspections would be scrapped at the new Huanggang checkpoint, which is expected to finish construction in 2026, allowing the clearance time between Shenzhen and Hong Kong to be cut from 20 to five minutes. She said this would allow the department to allocate manpower to deal with the workload at other ports.