Bad Cargo.

Ports are turning a blind eye to corruption. It can't go on for long.

IT'S TIME TO REVERSE THE CULTURE OF CUSTOMS CORRUPTION.

I'm not talking about drugs, guns or other contraband: I'm talking about legal cargo. Just more of it entering the country than what's listed on the official documents.

The importer does this so it can avoid high Latin American import taxes. Oh, sure, there may be an honest mistake or two, and many of these are caught at the ports, airports and other gateways.

But there is plenty of room for shipping shenanigans. In part, that's because manifests read more like legal briefs than codes for commerce. The paperwork is full of double-speak, obscurity and vagueness, all meant to protect every party involved as much as possible. There's a good reason for this. Problems usually mean legal action, and no one wants to get caught with a flank exposed.

Onboard, the ones responsible for keeping track of all of this are first mates like Jim Toy, who has chief-mated ships for Crowley American Transport and other shipping lines. "I double-check everything," he says. "Everything."

The mates--as well as the customs officers, trade officials and everyone else concerned--rely on the manifests to tell them the volume, type and size of the cargo. It's important to know all of this when deciding what cargo to put where--you don't want to smack down a container of hazardous material, for example, next to a box of some other volatile substance.

But what if those manifests aren't all they are cracked up to be? What if the boxes "said to contain"--as the official verbiage goes--a certain volume of goods really have more inside than the manifest lists?

Much of the time, the extra cargo is no mistake. And this dollop extra of cargo usually gets caught by no one.

It's an open secret. The importer, of course, knows what's going on. Another person clued in is the customs broker, the agent for the importer who steers the cargo through the bureaucratic maze of typical Latin American customs offices.

But the brokers can't do this without the help--indeed, without the implicit partnership--of the customs officers.

A wink and a nudge. In places like Brazil and Argentina, it usually works like this, according to the shippers and brokers who take part in the scam: An importer of, say, tiles, will go to the broker and make a plea, "I've got this shipment coming in. Now the manifest says ifs 20,000 pieces. But they made a mistake. It's really more like 40,000."

The broker shakes his head. "I don't know," he sighs. "It may be a little tough," After all, there could be fines, extra duties, paperwork--the wrong customs officer could hold up this shipment for ages.

So the two figure out that the extra cargo is worth US$500,000. The broker goes to a customs officer known to be "friendly" to such causes and says, "Listen, I've got this shipment coming in...." A deal is struck: The usual gratuity is about 10% of the value of the extra cargo for the customs officer. From the agent's payoff, 10% goes to the broker who went to so much trouble to set it all up.

We're not talking chump change. Some brokers and shippers estimate that up to a third of all shipments that come into Brazilian and Argentine ports are underreported. As a result, trade figures are less trustworthy. Also, some of that unreported cargo winds up on the black market, so there's no real way to track sales of some imported goods in some Latin countries.

Shippers and brokers would rather not talk about such shady deals, at least not on the record. Officially, customs offices in Brazil, Argentina and other Latin American countries are straight and honest. Nevertheless, Brazil recently upended its entire customs office in Santos, the country's busiest port, because of alleged irregularities discovered by new officers placed there.

Now is the time for the region to develop much more professional customs squads. The countries spend too much time piling up the paperwork and too little time molding better customs teams. They need to weed out the corrupt ones, pick better people and increase the pay for those who make the cut.

Everyone knows there's a problem here, but it's still too small to be a serious matter. The customs offices should get serious and root out this corruption before it chokes off the rest of the trade vine.