The Ruling That Keeps Coming Back: Section 25A and the Remand Loop

On 28th July 2026 the Directorate General of Customs Valuation at Karachi issued three “Valuation Rulings” on a single day: No. 2103/2026 on ceramic and porcelain sanitary ware, No. 2104/2026 on glassware, porcelain ware, stoneware and decorative pieces, and No. 2105/2026 on mobile telephone accessories, reported at seventy descriptions. Two are ordinary exercises in bringing a stale value up to date, each superseding a ruling of 2024 the Directorate itself calls more than two years old. The third recites its own history in a single paragraph, and that paragraph is the shortest honest account available of what has gone wrong with the machinery by which a customs value is fixed in this country.

One commodity, one year, four orders

The history recited in “Valuation Ruling” No. 2104/2026 runs as follows. On 21st July 2025 the Directorate of Customs Valuation at Lahore issued “Valuation Ruling” No. 03/2025 under Section 25A of the Customs Act, 1969 (Act IV of 1969). Importers and local manufacturers alike, each aggrieved for opposite reasons, filed revision petitions under Section 25D before the Director General, Customs Valuation, Karachi. The Director General, by “Order-in-Revision” No. 59/2025 of 17th October 2025, re-determined the values of porcelain ware, non-gold plated, of Chinese origin, and left the rest standing. The importers took that order to the Customs Appellate Tribunal at Karachi, which by its order of 20th April 2026 remanded the matter to the Director General for a fresh review. The Director General then passed “Order-in-Revision” No. 17/2026 on 19th June 2026, by which he remanded the impugned ruling to the Director, Customs Valuation, Karachi, with a direction to issue a fresh ruling within four weeks. The fresh ruling is No. 2104/2026 of 28th July 2026.

Three hundred and seventy two days separate the ruling of 21st July 2025 from the ruling of 28th July 2026. In that year the file passed through the Director General twice and through the Customs Appellate Tribunal once, and what stands at the end of it is a fresh determination itself open to a revision petition under Section 25D within thirty days, until on or about 27th August 2026. The loop is not a figure of speech; it is the course the papers actually took, recited by the Directorate in its own instrument.

What Section 25D permits, and what was done under it

Section 25D of the Customs Act, 1969, as substituted by the Finance Act, 2010, provides that notwithstanding Section 25A the Director General Valuation may, on his own motion or on a review petition made to him within thirty days from the date of determination, “rescind or determine the value afresh”, and the proviso requires that the proceedings so initiated “shall be completed within sixty days of the filing of the review petition or initiation of proceedings as the case may be”.

The section therefore confers two powers and no third: the Director General may rescind the value, or he may determine it afresh. He is given no power to remand a ruling to the officer who made it. Yet the order of 19th June 2026 does precisely that, and it does so exactly sixty days after the Tribunal’s order of 20th April 2026 which set the fresh proceedings running. The limit was thus observed to the day by an order that decides nothing the section requires to be decided, since the value was neither rescinded nor determined afresh but sent back to be determined by somebody else; and a time limit answered by an order the statute does not provide for is a time limit answered in form alone.

The direction that followed compounds the point. Four weeks from 19th June 2026 expired on 17th July 2026, and “Valuation Ruling” No. 2104/2026 issued on 28th July 2026, eleven days late, on which nothing turns, because Section 25A fixes the Directorate no period at all in which to determine a value. Since the citizen’s thirty days under Section 25D run from the date of determination and not from the date the determination reaches him, therefore the only period in this scheme that binds absolutely is the one that binds the importer.

The Tribunal was not supposed to remand either

Section 194A(1)(d) of the Customs Act, 1969 gives an appeal to the Appellate Tribunal against an order passed in revision by the Director General Customs Valuation under Section 25D, heard by a special bench of one judicial and one technical member. What that Tribunal may do is governed by Section 194B(1), and the language is unusually direct: it may pass such orders as it thinks fit “confirming, modifying or annulling the decision or order appealed against”, and it “may record additional evidence and decide the case but shall not remand the case for recording the additional evidence”; and by the proviso, “the appeal shall be decided within ninety days of filing the appeal”, extendable once by sixty days with the consent of both parties.

The statute has already identified remand as the disease and legislated against it, and the Tribunal is told to take the evidence itself and decide. The order of 20th April 2026 sent the matter back to the Director General instead, from whom it went back again to the Director, from whom a fresh ruling emerged more than three months later. Two statutory deadlines, ninety days at the Tribunal and sixty at the Director General, were in field throughout; the file still took a year, because a remand does not breach a deadline, it restarts one.

What the importer pays while the loop runs

None of this would matter greatly if the disputed value were held in suspense. It is not. Section 25A(4) provides that the value determined “shall be applicable until and unless revised or rescinded by the competent authority”, so the ruling under challenge governs assessment throughout the challenge. Section 194A(5) provides that notwithstanding an appeal the assessed or adjudged amount of duty and taxes remains payable unless the Tribunal stays recovery. And the third proviso to Section 81, which is the provision that would otherwise allow a provisional determination against security, shuts the door in terms: no provisional determination of value is allowed where a “Valuation Ruling” or a “Publication Valuation Ruling” issued under Section 25A is in field, “irrespective of the fact whether any review or revision against such Valuation Ruling is pending in terms of section 25D or relevant rules”.

Hence for the whole of those three hundred and seventy two days every importer of glassware, porcelain ware and stoneware paid duty and sales tax on values two forums had by then found unsatisfactory, with no provisional route, no security arrangement and no refund short of winning outright at the end of a chain that produced no decision. That is not justice delayed; it is a remedy structurally incapable of arriving before the money has gone.

The remedy outlives the instrument

The glassware file is not exceptional, and the tyre litigation is the longer version of it. “Valuation Rulings” Nos. 1543, 1544 and 1545 of 2021, all of 3rd August 2021, were carried by revision under Section 25D to the Director General, who dismissed the petitions by orders of 14th and 22nd December 2021; the Customs Appellate Tribunal by its judgment of 26th July 2022 set aside both the rulings and the orders in revision and accepted the importers’ declared values as transaction values under Section 25(1); and the Honourable High Court of Sindh at Karachi, in Special Customs Reference Applications Nos. 650 to 680 of 2022, The Director General, Customs Valuation, Karachi versus Messrs Seven Star Tyre and connected matters, set the Tribunal’s order aside on 29th February 2024 for misreading the record on the sequential application of Section 25 and for accepting declared values without any exercise in respect of each transaction.

Two years, six months and twenty six days from the ruling to the last order, and no value determined at the end of it. Against that, the working life of a “Valuation Ruling” is about two years: No. 2103/2026 supersedes a ruling of 26th April 2024 and No. 2105/2026 one of 31st May 2024, each replaced on the ground of age alone. A remedy which routinely takes longer than the instrument it attacks is not a remedy; it is an expensive way of arriving at a ruling that has already been superseded by another.

What should change, and what is open until 27th August 2026

Three amendments would do most of the work and none requires a new institution. Section 25D should say expressly that on a review petition or on remand the Director General shall rescind the value or determine it afresh and shall not remit the matter to the Director or the Collector, since a power Parliament withheld should not survive by practice. Section 25A should carry a period of its own, so that a Directorate directed to redetermine a value is bound by statute rather than by a direction nobody enforces. And the thirty days under Section 25D should run from communication of the ruling, as the thirty days under Section 194A(2) already run from communication of the order appealed against, there being no principle on which the same litigant is met with a clock that starts before he can read what has been done to him.

Until then the practical point for the trade is a date. Each of the three rulings of 28th July 2026 carries the Directorate’s own endorsement that a revision petition lies under Section 25D within thirty days before the Director General, Customs Valuation, and that period expires on or about 27th August 2026. Importers of ceramic and porcelain sanitary ware, of glassware, porcelain ware and stoneware, and of mobile telephone accessories who consider the new values wrong have until then, and no provisional assessment in the meanwhile. Very unfortunately, an importer who lets the date pass is not left with a lesser remedy; he is left with the value, for about two years, until the ruling comes round again.