NCAA Reads Riot Act To Foreign Airlines

Simon Ateba/Aviation correspondent

Nigeria’s aviation regulatory body has given foreign airlines operating in the country two weeks to comply with some regulations or face sanctions, a spokesman said on Tuesday.

Mr. Fan Ndubuoke, General Manager, Public Affairs at the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, NCAA, quoted the Acting Director General of the agency, Joyce Daniel Nkemakolam, as saying that foreign airlines that do not comply with NCAA’s Revenue Automation requirements will be sanctioned.

In a press statement titled ‘NCAA reads riot act to foreign airlines’ Ndubuoke said The NCAA boss was miffed by the non-compliance of a substantial number of the airlines to NCAA’s Revenue Automation requirements.

“He has therefore given the erring ones two weeks to comply or face sanctions, just as he commended some of the foreign airlines that have been complying,” he said.

Ndubuoke said ‘the riot act’ was handed down in a meeting with the foreign airlines at the Aviation House Conference Room in Lagos , sourthwest Nigeria, on Monday.

He said according to NCAA’s Regulations regarding revenue collection, the operating airlines are mandated to forward derivable data at the end of every flight operation to the regulatory authority at the shortest possible time.

These data are forwarded using NCAA’s AVITECH{Aviation Technology, the contracting firm handling the automation} Portal for easy and transparent transaction to facilitate appropriate billing for the Ticket Sales Charge (TSC) and Cargo Sales Charge (CSC).

At the close of any flight the data required by NCAA/AVITECH for billing is to cover the following components: Flight Number, Flight Date, Ticket Number, Ticket Class, Flight Route, Originating Country, Currency of Sale, Basic Fare,YQ,Security Tax, Airport Tax, Total Fare and Rate of Exchange.

“While some airlines requested for more time to synchronise their operating system with the Portal, some were discovered to be contending with some parts of the components, especially, the YQ, Security Tax and Airport Tax,” Ndubuoke said, adding: “the DG said this was unacceptable as these were stipulated country taxes which applies all over the world.”
He said the NCAA is frowning at the delay in compliance as the alternate measure is manual composition which is cumbersome, time consuming and fraught with human errors.

“This error margin even if it is minimal can lead to loss of revenue,” the statement read.