After more than a month of piloting electronic customs clearance in Ho Chi Minh City, several results have been achieved; however, there are still many issues to resolve for this modernization step to meet the desired criteria.
Initial Results
According to the Ho Chi Minh City Customs Department, implementing electronic customs procedures is a key task in the modernization plan for the customs sector in both the short and long term. In this spirit, during one month (from October 4 to November 4), the Ho Chi Minh City Electronic Customs Sub-Department processed 576 declarations, including 509 import declarations and 67 export declarations.
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Staff at the Ho Chi Minh City Electronic Customs Sub-Department using the electronic customs clearance program |
Specifically: there were 67 green channel export declarations; for imports, there were 216 green channel declarations, 269 yellow channel declarations, and 24 red channel declarations. Yellow channel declarations included goods that required inspection, goods that needed permits, goods that required quality checks, companies with tax debts, and goods subject to immediate tax payments; red channel declarations included goods that needed to be stamped and goods with suspected tax rates.
It is known that the time for customs procedures and clearance for the green channel is 3-10 minutes, the yellow channel is 20-30 minutes, and the red channel takes 1-3 hours. The process of receiving and exporting goods for customs confirmation depends on the preparation of delivery documents, transportation means, and other operational activities of relevant authorities…
According to Mr. Nguyen Thanh Long, Deputy Head of the Ho Chi Minh City Electronic Customs Sub-Department, a total of 25 enterprises have been granted certificates to participate in the electronic customs procedure, but only 20 of these enterprises are currently engaged in customs procedures. From these 20 enterprises, the total import-export turnover reached 51.29 million USD, with exports amounting to 16 million USD and imports totaling 35.29 million USD. From here, the total tax revenue can be calculated at 102 billion VND, with 23.4 billion VND collected so far.
Electronic Yet Still Manual…
According to the assessment from the Ho Chi Minh City Electronic Customs Sub-Department, the results achieved so far are quite promising, but they are just the initial steps. Currently, electronic customs clearance still involves many manual steps. Specifically, when an enterprise requests to amend the content of a permit, the Electronic Customs Sub-Department issues a tracking slip to offset the permit and returns it to the enterprise.
In practice, enterprises handling customs procedures typically do not agree to let the Electronic Customs Sub-Department retain the permit when submitting it for offsetting, resulting in the tracking of permits being conducted as if under manual customs procedures.
At present, there are no regulations for determining taxable values, post-clearance audits, information collection and processing, risk management, and customs control applicable to electronic customs procedures, all of which are still performed manually, which is not suitable for electronic customs procedures. The requirement for manual handling is further specified under Decision 50/2005/QD-BTC: Enterprises self-declare and take responsibility for calculating taxes; when enterprises declare electronically, the customs authority checks the tax calculation through the system.
However, the program is not yet automated, and the Electronic Customs Sub-Department must use a separately developed tax calculation program to verify tax calculations. Moreover, most of the commodity policies of the ministries related to special consumption tax have not been encoded; the export-import tax schedule, and preferential tax rates by country and region have not been fully compiled, leading to entirely manual channel designation.
Software Still Incomplete
The first issue is the amendment of declarations by enterprises. The program has not designed the content for stating the reasons for requesting amendments to declarations, nor does it automatically notify the status of the amendment requests, and the steps for amending declarations have not been reasonably structured. As such, cases involving amended declarations are often processed slowly. Consequently, the customs authority must regularly check the list of declarations requiring amendments and contact the enterprises by phone to determine the necessary amendments before accepting them.
The software program also reveals its incompleteness in tracking and offsetting permits, which is handled as if it were manual customs due to the variety of permits and lack of standardization. For example, if a permit has two lines of goods with duplicate codes, the system does not know which line to process; if quotas are assigned based on value, the system cannot determine whether to offset based on the declared value or the taxable value, nor when to perform the offset; if the enterprise declares differently from the unit of measurement on the permit, the system cannot handle it either.
Furthermore, the electronic customs declaration form HQ/2005-TKĐT is generally stipulated for both import and export declarations. For export declarations, determining the country of import is crucial for issuing the Certificate of Origin (C/O). However, the current declaration form lacks a criterion for the country of import, only specifying the country of export, making it difficult for enterprises to obtain C/O and make payments…
In light of these realities, Mr. Do Dinh Thuc, Deputy Director of the Ho Chi Minh City Customs Department, believes that it is essential to promptly improve and upgrade the current program, rectify the errors, and add the missing functionalities as mentioned above.
Establishing a backup system to ensure the safety of electronic customs clearance in the short term, especially for the upcoming expansion phase, and researching an appropriate model for electronic customs clearance according to a suitable roadmap to enhance the functions and duties of the current Electronic Customs Sub-Department are also urgent tasks.
Only in this way can the plan to expand electronic customs clearance to approximately 60-70 enterprises in 2005 and implement electronic customs clearance at Tan Son Nhat Airport, Tan Thuan Export Processing Zone, and Linh Trung be feasible…
BÁ TÂN
