Taiwan annually documents hundreds of breaches of its export rules, some of which include the sale of products that can be used to develop weapons of mass destruction, with the bulk of those illicit product transfers going to Iran, Kyodo News reported on Tuesday.

In 2006, Taiwan designated North Korea and Iran as countries that are subject to its system for controlling exports of sensitive strategic technology. Even still, Taipei has had difficulty in fully enforcing its national export controls against the two countries -- as a recent bribery case involving customs agents working in Taiwan shows.

In early August, 20 customs officials working at Taiwan's shipping hub at Kaohsiung were formally charged with accepting kickbacks in exchange for forgoing inspections or looking the other way when they saw fraudulent documents on the export of used machinery components, which in reality were equipment required to run atomic reactors.

The vacuum pumps and ball-bearing components in question are prohibited by Taipei from sale abroad to North Korea and Iran, which are under U.N. Security Council sanctions that forbid nations from selling them nuclear weapons-relevant technology. The parts were imported from Japan by shell firms established by Taiwanese merchants.

The Taiwanese Foreign Trade Bureau on a yearly basis records in excess of 200 breaches of national export control rules. Since cross-strait relations have gradually been growing better, more Chinese entitites have been using Taiwan as a midway point for shipping regulated products to a sanctoined third-party nation, according to Kyodo.