Year of the compliant trader

If there was one wish that every sensible Customs officer and declarant would make for 2010, it should surely be for the reinstallation of a fair deal for the truly compliant trader.

Under the malevolent influence of sustained terrorism and the dubious interventions of political risk managers, compliance has been redefined in excruciating detail reaching far beyond the customary hallmarks of sustained honesty and operational efficiency into new recesses of recruitment, lighting, sealing and recordkeeping standards.

The single, isolated all-important quality of known and proven integrity has been cluttered and in no way improved by a profuse set of supposedly relevant indicators.

What is even more bizarre and unreasonable is the new terrorism-generated principle that having stipulated and secured these new and onerous extra standards of compliance require the most qualified Customs-Trader Partnership Against Terrorism member or EU Authorized Economic Operator to supply exactly the same data at the same times and jump through the same procedural hoops as their most suspect or least-known competitors.

In the months preceding the tragic events of 9/11 international trade facilitation was still firmly anchored to a principle conveniently defined in International Chamber of Commerce Customs Guideline 19 namely:

A modern Customs service replaces transaction-by-transaction treatment by account-based, post-entry procedures for importers with proven compliance histories and consistent import patterns (e.g., types of goods and origins).

This succinct and sufficient gage of security for controllers and recognition of quality in those controlled has been swamped in a surging wave of superposed, multilayered precautions.

If you are so unfortunate, for example, as to make your living in moving goods across national frontiers in maritime container systems you can be a world-class company, enjoying decades of irreproachable official contacts with import and export customs and concentrating most of your transactions into a very small number of highly repetitive channels, but you must still supply 12 items of data at a prescribed time before export for each individual transaction and have to take account of legislation that still requires eventual 100 percent scanning of all your containers destined for the United States….

For all this time every trader or carrier seeking to import goods into the United States, European Union and a number of other destinations has had to install, and prove that he has installed, a number of quite expensive and commercially unnecessary management controls. During all these months he has had to provide information that is often already known to customs from their own records of past identical transactions….

If the effectiveness of customs-trade working relationships truly depends on mutual esteem and confidence then a prolonged experience of the present negation of true “compliance” philosophy is bound to prove sadly corrosive.

On the other hand, and more positively, some revised procedural regimes in the hands of customs and a long-overdue rethink of anti-terrorist strategies by some politicians may well mark out 2010 as the beginning of a possibly long road back to practical balance and reality.