Building a centralized data system for Customs reform and management

VCN – On March 5.2019, Director General of Customs Nguyen Van Can presided over a meeting to evaluate the task performance in February 2019 and deploy tasks for March 2019 of the General Department of Customs. In addition to the task of state budget collection, the Director General requested the Customs sector to focus on building a centralized data system for Customs reform and management

Regarding the reason for this increase, the country’s total import and export turnover in the two months achieved US$ 73.44 billion, up 6.7%. In which, import turnover of some major commodities tended to increase such as: computers, electronic products and components reached US$ 7.5 billion, up by 11.4%, Machinery, equipment and parts thereof achieved US$ 5.56 billion, up by 14.6$; Plastic products reached US$ 952 million, up by 18.4% from the same period last year.According to the statistics from General Department of Customs, in the first two months of 2019, Customs collected VND 53,410 billion, equivalent to 17% of the State budget estimate of 2019 (VND 300,500), equivalent o 16.9% of desired target, a year-on-year increase of 15%.

tap trung xay dung he thong du lieu trung tam de cai cach va quan ly hai quan
The meeting of the leaders of General Department of Customs. Photo: T. Trang

Also in this two months, the number of containers of scraps declared on E-manifest in seaports was 21,595 containers (down 2,589 containers over the previous month). In which, the number of containers stored at seaports under 30 days was 6,237 units, the number over 90 days was 9,648 units (down 224 containers over the previous month.

The whole sector has screened 2,725 containers and detected 24 suspicious containers (accounting for 0.88% of total screened containers), 3 infringing containers (accounting for 12.5% of total suspicious containers). Accordingly, requesting to screen 341 containers and discovering 5 suspicious containers (accounting for 1.47% of total screened containers) and 1 infringing container (accounting for 20% of total suspicious containers

Through the screening, Customs discovered some big smuggling cases such as: Hai Phong Customs Department consecutively arrested 2 smuggling cases of banned goods (total weight of 3.1 tons of pangolin scales and ivories) hidden in wood; Customs Branch of Sai Gon port zone IV seized 1 Chinese shipment in which many goods which were not declared, are subject to specialized inspection (cosmetics, supplementary food, traditional Chinese medicine materials and so on).

Particularly, in terms of channel classification, in February 2019, the sector has carried out channel classification for 853,137 declarations including 490,123 Green Channel declarations, reaching 57.45%, 322.723 Yellow Channel declarations, reaching 37.83% and 40.291 Red Channel declarations, reaching 4.72%, and detected 1,449 illegal dossiers and 1,857 illegal declarations and fined 1,423 organizations and individuals.

One outstanding result of the Customs sector in the first 2 months of 2019 is the anti-smuggling and anti-trade fraud. The entire Customs sector has chaired, coordinated, discovered and arrested a total of 2,643 infringing cases in the field of customs; collected VND 29,471 billion VND; has issued 7 decisions for prosecution and transfer other agencies to prosecute 15 cases.

With the achievements of the Customs in the first 2 months of 2019, Director General of Customs Nguyen Van Can said that this is a positive initial result, but to deploy the key tasks for 2019, the whole Customs sector needs to focus more on customs supervision and management.

Accordingly, for the state budget collection, the Director General requires Customs units to take the initiative in synchronously carrying out collection solutions in Directive 723 / CT-TCHQ – the backbone for the whole Customs to realize this political task – the Director General emphasized.

As a standing agency of National Steering Committee for ASEAN Single Window, National Single Window and Trade Facilitation, the Director General asked the whole sector to focus on building a centralized data system to integrate both requirements for administrative procedure reforms and requirements for Customs management; and developing a modern customs management system including customs clearance and customs management.

Along with that, the Director General asked Customs units to apply risk management tools in customs supervision. However, He also required to reduce the hard criteria of the risk management, improve the efficiency and effectiveness of using the sector’s scanning system, the risk control for import and export goods, people and means in entry and exit.

For the management of imported scrap, enhancing management of goods as scrap, used goods with characteristics of scrap backlogged in customs operation area, strictly handling violations. In the immediate future, it is necessary to build new management regulations from the perspective of scrap management and waste discard, accordingly setting requirements for customs supervision and management is assess and analyze goods information before channel classification for inspection.

For the internal management, the Director General required to continue strict implementing of working regulations of the General Department of Customs, internal inspection and control regulations for the implementation of customs procedures, customs inspection and supervision, regulations on public duty performance of Vietnam Customs; maintaining disciplines of Customs officials in the duty performance and strictly handling officials and public employees who break the regulations, developing a process to control the 3-level inspection regulation and performing a monthly review of the inspection.

By Thu Trang/ Huyen Trang