This study describes the challenges faced by customs officials in the Philippines when they adopted transaction valuation to facilitate imports, and the way in which they overcame these challenges. The Philippines government needed to adopt its international treaty obligations into domestic law, and it did that with two laws. It enacted Republic Act (RA) 8181 in 1997, which enabled transaction valuation reform. However, various obstacles hindered the implementation of this law, and so in 2001 the government adopted RA 9135 to fix the problem in RA 8181 so as to authorize post-entry audit systems.

There had been two major concerns in the Philippines regarding the country's obligations to shift its customs values from notional published values to transaction values. On the part of the customs authorities, they expected customs collection to go down as importers took advantage of their legal rights, undervalued their imports with fake invoices knowing that customs authorities would never know on time that they did so and so paid lower duties and taxes than they ought to. On their part, domestic producers were fearful that implementation of this obligation would erode their trade protection. The Philippines has nevertheless implemented its obligation and has used transaction values in customs assessments since 2000.

Three and a half year later, the then Customs Commissioner, Antonio M. Bernardo, has been pleased to see that customs collections have been going up. However, domestic producers are still concerned and keep adjusting to these changes.