Joint Efforts Needed to Reduce Goods Clearance Time

 

Officials from the Ministry of Finance and the General Department of Vietnam Customs recorded problems and issues voiced by businesses and agreed on more vigorous reforms in specialised examination. In fact, not only businesses but customs authorities also confront difficulties with specialised inspection procedures which are not specified by customs authorities. For the time being, documents relating to specialised inspections are in great number.

 

As of August 2015 customs authorities are involved in a total of 265 legal documents related to specialised management, including 20 laws, 54 decrees, 191 ministerial circulars and decisions. As a rule, importers are subject to three stages of specialised inspection, including custom declarations registration (responsibility of customs authorities), specialised examination (the responsibility of specialised management agencies) and clearance of goods following the result of specialised examinations (the responsibility of customs authorities).

 

Up to 78 percent of the total operating time spent for clearance of goods belongs to the power of other ministries and branches while customs authorities handle just only 28 percent of time, which is completely electronically processed. Specifically, electronic customs declaration needs only a single declaration form instead of many as before. It takes only 1-3 seconds to clear goods classified "green flow" and imposed no tax on the VNACCS/VCIS automated customs clearance system. Electronic tax payment only needs 5-7 minutes. At present, the General Department of Customs has signed tax collection agreements with 25 commercial banks and prepared to sign the agreement with six new lenders. The General Department has also applied barcodes to customs monitoring procedures to reduce the declaration time to just one minute, thus helping minimising freight congestions at ports.

 

As a standing body of the National Steering Committee for the National Single Window (NSW) and the ASEAN Single Window (ASW), the General Department of Customs has been actively coordinating with relevant ministries and agencies to deploy the NSW and connect it with the ASW. So far, nine ministries have joined the NSW and brought 21 administrative procedures to the NSW Portal (except for the Ministry of Finance), of which 18 procedures are involved in specialised examination.

 

The Ministry of Finance was assigned by the Government to lead and coordinate with other ministries and agencies to develop the project "Solutions to improving effective and efficient operations of specialised inspections on imported and exported goods." The project aims to provide favourable conditions for businesses to fulfil export and import procedures at border gates in a simple, rapid and convenient manner to shorten the goods clearance time. As soon as it is put into practice, the project will help businesses reduce waiting time and costs related to specialised examination, hence contributing to protecting domestic production and improving corporate competitiveness.