According to the Customs Department of Ho Chi Minh City, the VNACCS/VCIS system will be brought into official operation on May 15, 2014. As many companies register to use the system and the volume of cargo handled is huge, the Customs Department has made meticulous preparation and suggested solutions to address emerging problems.
Practising, preparing carefully
After being trained, more than 1,300 companies have been granted VNACCS/VCIS accounts and 12,000 companies have been granted digital signatures. Currently, this work continues to be carried out. In addition, to ensure facilities, the department has examined the entire machinery and equipment for the commissioning of VNACCS/VCIS system. Presently, it has 153 servers, including 92 machines with above-average configurations, for the operation of VNACCS/VCIS system in the coming time. Remaining servers, purchased from 2004 to 2008, are obsolete. The department also has 1,761 workstations, of which 993 units have above-average configurations and the rest are obsolete. Hence, it proposed the General Department of Vietnam Customs to equip suitable equipment and machines for the deployment of VNACCS/VCIS system.
According to the plan, the Customs Department of Ho Chi Minh City will operate the system at the Customs Office of Saigon Port - Area 1 where handles the largest volume of exports and imports in Cat Lai Terminal. To prepare for the smooth official operation of VNACCS/VCIS system, the Customs Office of Saigon Port - Area 1 focuses on training and informing civil servants and businesses. With more than 10,000 companies registering to use e-customs procedures, to inform and persuade companies to participate in the VNACCS/VCIS system, apart from the general training programme of the department, the office has also applied some feasible measures. For example, it issued VNACCS/VCIS professional handbooks for employees to follow.
Besides, during the test-run period of VNACCS/VCIS system, the office requested companies to bring PCs to its units to install software and learn how to use it.
Recommendations to address problems
For problems arising during the trial run of the VNACCS/VCIS system, the Customs Department recommended to the General Department of Vietnam Customs solutions to address those problems. Specifically, the system will automatically disable login accounts of customs officers after five unsuccessful attempts. This will seriously affect the work when the system is commissioning and going into operation.
The programme does not support the declaration of container serials, thus customs officers must spend a lot of time to look up container serials in E-manifest programme and this is a challenge for customs with a lot of declaration papers. The programme does not have any function for declaring the number of contracts - an important legal basis of customs records. It does not disable duplicated declaration forms and many companies try to file multiple declarations to seek Green Flow permits.
Besides, the programme does not have log functions, thus causing a lot of difficulty in keeping track of declarations. It lacks warning functions for declaration papers exceeding the deadline by 15 days and customs officers still can use CEE/CEA operations (for checking imports and exports) although they cannot carry out CKO operations (changing flows of declaration documents).
In reality, the Ho Chi Minh City Customs Department proposed the General Department of Vietnam Customs to remove shortcomings and problems to operate VNACCS/VCIS system better. In addition, it is necessary to quickly complete legal requirements for the official operation of VNACCS/VCIS system, build backup systems to deal with incidents when data are forwarded to the General Department of Vietnam Customs, and quickly upgrade and replace obsolete servers and workstations at Ho Chi Minh City Department Customs to raise the processing capacity of VNACCS/VCIS system.
Thu Hien
Vietnamese
