The suc­cess­ful and smooth run­ning of the Au­to­mat­ed Sys­tems for Cus­tom Da­ta (ASY­CU­DA) is heav­i­ly de­pen­dent on the con­signee pro­vid­ing com­plete, ac­cu­rate and truth­ful in­for­ma­tion. So said Fitzroy John, Comp­trol­ler of Cus­toms and Ex­cise Di­vi­sion, on Tues­day at a con­fer­ence host­ed by the T&T Man­u­fac­tur­ers' As­so­ci­a­tion (TTMA) at its Barataria of­fices, to up­date im­porters and ex­porters on the sta­tus of the ASY­CU­DA sys­tem. Now that the sys­tem is on­stream, John said Cus­toms is giv­ing cit­i­zens an op­por­tu­ni­ty to demon­strate the high­est lev­el of vol­un­tary com­pli­ance in pro­vid­ing ac­cu­rate in­for­ma­tion in the doc­u­ment pro­cess­ing stage, to en­sure the process works well and fast. Fail­ure to do so would re­sult in se­ri­ous con­se­quences and heavy fines and penal­ties, in­clud­ing for­fei­ture of goods, and fines up to a max­i­mum of $125,000, John ex­plained.

He said that cus­tomers would be placed in three cat­e­gories ac­cord­ing to their lev­el of com­pli­ance: green, yel­low and red. Green be­ing the high­est lev­el of com­pli­ance where the cus­tomer would have ran­dom checks; yel­low lane is for ship­ments that are award­ed tax ex­emp­tions due to bi­lat­er­al and oth­er agree­ments; and, red, the low­est lev­el of com­pli­ance. John said the doc­u­ment pro­cess­ing stage was one of the ar­eas iden­ti­fied in sev­er­al re­ports, es­pe­cial­ly the World Do­ing Busi­ness re­port, as a ma­jor fac­tor in slow­ing down the en­tire process. "But when I cal­cu­lat­ed what was cost­ing busi­ness­es on an an­nu­al ba­sis for pro­cess­ing goods de­c­la­ra­tion in T&T, the fig­ure was em­bar­rass­ing and un­ac­cept­able." Tightlipped about re­veal­ing the ex­act fig­ure, John stat­ed that doc­u­ment pro­cess­ing was one of the big dri­vers to tran­si­tion from man­u­al to au­to­mat­ed sys­tems. It im­pact­ed on the cost of do­ing busi­ness and the cost of goods.

New sys­tem, faster pro­cess­ing

Busi­ness as­so­ci­a­tions like the TTMA and the T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce have for years clam­oured for im­ple­men­ta­tion of the ASY­CU­DA sys­tem. They have ad­vo­cat­ed it would as­sist in faster de­liv­ery of goods, al­low for smoother pay­ments, re­duce the cost and time of do­ing busi­ness and im­prove the over­all ef­fi­cien­cy of Cus­toms and Ex­cise. John said pri­or to the in­tro­duc­tion of ASY­CU­DA, it was tak­ing three to five days, while, in some cas­es, sev­en days to have a doc­u­ment processed in Cus­toms. "With re­gards to im­ports, we are now down to one to two days, but when the nec­es­sary amend­ments are passed, we would be down to min­utes. For ex­ports, we are down to two min­utes." The Cus­toms Bor­der Con­trol leg­is­la­tion, an amend­ment to the Cus­toms Act, is a crit­i­cal piece of amend­ment that would re­quire agents of air­craft and ships to sub­mit their doc­u­ments in ad­vance of their ar­rival, in con­junc­tion to T&T's risk man­age­ment mod­ule.

This would al­low Cus­toms to de­ci­pher which con­signee presents T&T with the high­est risk to both rev­enue and se­cu­ri­ty. He said the sys­tem en­hances Cus­toms' ca­pa­bil­i­ty to iden­ti­fy high-risk con­signee and ship­ment.

"We have al­ready been able to de­tect such ac­tiv­i­ty," he said. By the end of the month, John said more than 90 per cent of the doc­u­ment de­c­la­ra­tion filled out by con­signees would be at full as­sess­ment stage. The project im­ple­men­ta­tion, a joint ven­ture be­tween the Gov­ern­ment and the Unit­ed Na­tions Con­fer­ence on­Trade and De­vel­op­ment, is al­most com­plete. He said Cus­toms is still in dis­cus­sion with the Trade Min­istry and oth­er req­ui­site bod­ies to work through the in­ter­face with Cus­toms Bor­der Con­trol por­tal and the TTBi­zLink por­tal to en­sure there is no breach of con­fi­den­tial­i­ty da­ta. He said all in­for­ma­tion would be ac­ces­si­ble to all to en­sure trans­paren­cy and ac­count­abil­i­ty. He out­lined that au­dits would be more in­tru­sive, pri­or­i­ty ar­eas would be giv­en to ware­hous­ing, ex­cise and ap­prove un­der­tak­ing.