E-Custom Procedures: More Adjustments Required

Mr Vu Ngoc Anh, Deputy General Director of the General Department of Customs, said the meeting aimed at making a comprehensive assessment on results achieved after two years of applying pilot e-customs procedures in accordance with the Prime Minister’s Decision 103/2009/QD-TTG and pointing out shortcomings and lessons learned to advance the application at the 2012 - 2015 period and deploy the Vietnam Automated Cargo and Port Consolidated System (VNACCS) and Vietnam Customs Information System (VCIS) funded by the Japanese Government,

 

According to latest statistics by the General Department of Customs, since the pilot e-customs procedures were officially launched till mid-October 2011, Vietnam has nearly 47,000 companies using the service. Five provinces led the country in terms of participants, namely Ho Chi Minh City, Hai Phong, Hanoi, Lang Son and Binh Duong. Some localities had very high rate of real users to total registering companies like Ho Chi Minh City (99.15 percent), Ha Noi (99.11 percent) and Can Tho (96.59 percent). To date, 20 provinces and cities have deployed electronic customs information. The biggest benefits of e-customs procedures are time-saving, cost-effective and limited misconduct.

 

But after two years of applying pilot e-customs procedures in 20 provinces and cities, a lot of problems arose, causing difficulty for State authorities, exporters and importers. At present, the coexistence of two customs methods, namely electronics customs and conventional customs, has led to overlapping in instruction and deploy. Hence, attending companies proposed a consistency in State management and risk management in these two types. In addition, the deployment of e-customs procedure is inconsistent with other e-customs programmes like e-Payment electronics payment and e-Manifest electronics manifest system. An official from the General Department of Customs said instable telecom services caused a lot of difficulties in delivering data between companies and customs authorities.

 

Some importers and exporters complained that e-customs procedures were quite cumbersome and time-consuming in some places. “Although e-customs procedures are aimed at quick clearance of commodities at port, companies still have to wait a long time for being granted declaration forms and flow classification. This slowness affected production and business operations,” a company representative said to the meeting. Even, companies sometimes had to come to customs offices to handle new problems.

 

After hearing difficulties presented by companies and customs authorities at the meeting, Deputy Finance Minister Do Hoang Anh Tuan pledged “We will propose amendments and supplements to deal with these problems. Management programmes (software) are being implemented step by step; thus, the synchronisation and compatibility of the system are not actually high. In the coming time, the third version of e-customs procedures will be deployed in customs offices and some problems will be troubleshot by this version. Then, more experienced customs departments will guide other localities to deploy e-customs procedures in combination with software donated by the Japanese Government. This software is considered most advanced in the world. When this system is put into operation, it will fundamentally address current problems.”

As planned, in 2014, the General Department of Customs will apply e-customs procedure to all forms on a national scale in 33 provinces and cities. This will facilitate the implementation of national single-window mechanism.