E-customs Clearance Attracts too few Enterprises

Only 22 out of 66 selected enterprises in Ho Chi Minh City have registering for e-customs clearance while customs officers in the city still do their work manually.

 

Hardly anyone can deny the great efforts of the customs sector in Ho Chi Minh City when they introduced the e-customs clearance, which is considered a breakthrough in the process of the global economic integration. However, after two months’ official implementation of the e-customs clearance, apart from quick cargo release and minimum warehousing costs, the new system has proven to have numerous irrationalities such as limited implementation scales. According to one customs officer, the e-customs clearance will be unable to develop if no new regulations and amendments are made to the system.

 

Until now, of the 66 enterprises selected for the implementation of e-customs clearance procedures in Ho Chi Minh City, only 22 actually took part. They have cleared nearly 900 declarations and received an import-export turnover of US$1.4 billion - quite a humble figure. So, what is the reason for the unwillingness of many enterprises in employing e-customs clearance?

 

Mr. Nguyen Thanh Long, deputy director of the E-customs Department, said the e-customs clearance is optional for enterprises. The incomplete clearance software fails to meet the work requirements. Customs declaration clearance is automatic if commodities are verified “green” (no problem) but it is not possibly automatic if commodities are verified “yellow” or “red” (with problems). Enterprises then still have to appear at customs offices to show their documents although they have already declared them online.

 

Mr. Le Van Khoi of the Petroleum Co. Zone 2 said: “Our unit was among the first to be selected to implement e-customs clearance procedure, however, until now, we have not implemented it because the customs software failed to resolve declarations of specific sectors such as petroleum. Taking products which are temporarily imported and then exported to other countries as an example, the electronic declaration sample lacks space for filling in actual re-export volume. If the declared product is petroleum the problem will become more complicated because prices of petroleum products are changeable and importers only know the prices at the time enterprises receive them. However, the clearance software lacks functions related to price changes. As a result, manual customs clearance is preferred. Last but not least, declaration spaces in the electronic sample are also inadequate, including importing countries, GATT values, bale volumes and batch weights. Besides, there is no regulation on e-declaration consignments.

 

This is the confession of one customs officer in the E-Customs Department. It sounds irrational but it is the truth. Normally, machines do everything from processing to categorizing coded commodities. However, here, after receiving online declarations, customs officers have to recheck every word.

 

The work becomes more complicated if an enterprise makes a declaration mistake. Both the enterprise and customs office have to redo their works. All difficulties originate from incompatible software and shortages of cooperation between relevant branches in coding regulations and commodities.

 

Mr Nguyen Thanh Long said with the current conditions, e-customs clearance cannot be expanded and the 40-staff Ho Chi Minh City E-customs Department is able to handle 50-60 enterprises.

 

To overcome the above shortcomings, all kinds of commodities must be coded.