Joining Hands to Prevent Fraudulence in E-Customs

According to General Department of Vietnam Customs, from October 1^st 2009 to August 31^st 2013, Customs agencies discovered and captured about 7,051 frauds with value of nearly VND453 billion. Frauds mainly relied on fraudulent registers of number, sort of products, value, code, products tax rate, counterfeit foreign trade receipts and other counterfeit receipts in customs procedures. Many infringements were considered on purposes.

 

The E-Customs for years has facilitated enterprises trading. Products in green flow will be immediately allowed. Therefore, some enterprises abused it to perform fraudulences for illegal benefits.

 

Many enterprises fulfill declaration many times and hand it over and over again, if their products are on red flow (which show the obligation of examining products and procedures), they will cancel and redo it, until their products are on green flow.

 

Many enterprises registered their products, which are not named in the list of risk management and professional management of ministries and sectors, so they can be allocated in green flow and get exemption of examination and immediate clearance.

 

Some enterprises did not register or made false registration in number of product, product code, product tax, value to be taxed, sort of products; exported fewer products than registered ones to gain valued added refund tax; registered untaxed products for taxed products.

 

For exported products in some containers, because there is no number registration in containers, enterprises can register many declarations at once. When export declaration is in green flow, enterprises can attach containers with contrabands to ones with products in green flow.

 

Enterprises can also register many declarations for one sort of products with same amount. After the result of allocating the flows, enterprises will cancel the red flow declaration to avoid examining products.

 

At the “Preventing fraudulences in declaration through E-Customs Conference” organised in Hanoi, many solutions are proposed to improve procedures of examining and preventing fraudulences of enterprises.

 

In order to prevent enterprises from abusing declaration through E-Customs to gain illegal benefits, Customs agencies will accelerate their activities of gathering enterprises information, classifying enterprises into good and bad ones; supplementing policy relating to code, tax rate, value to be taxed in the customs website for customs officers can timely update information; improving inspections, controls after clearance for removing errors in electric customs procedures.

 

Mr Do Hoang Anh Tuan, Deputy Finance Minister requested the harmonisation of Customs agencies between creating facilities for enterprises and tightly controlling. General Department of Customs should study and advise the Ministry of Finance to build effective sanctions to punish fraudulent activities like counterfeit declaration, canceling declaration, repeating declarations. Especially, it must fulfill activities of fighting smuggle, trade frauds in E-Customs for accelerating modernisation of the system. Furthermore, it also needs to promote effective adoption of supportive equipment (scanner machine container, camera system) in controlling export activities.