A Customs unit with industrial working style

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Operational activities at the North Thang Long Customs Branch. Photo: Ngoc Linh

Professionalism

The North Thang Long Industrial Park Customs Sub—department located between factories, workshops in North Thang Long Industrial Park has modern and spacious headquarters.

The active working atmosphere covers the first floor space, but there was no loud talk or frowns and grimaces of the Customs officers as well as enterprises; the enterprises were settled respectively like a factory chain. Suddenly I thought that “It truly is an Industrial Part of Customs”

Sharing the achievements of the unit in 2016, the Director of the North Thang Long Industrial Park Customs Sub-department, Mr. Bach Nhat Quang was modest to say that “The North Thang Long Industrial Park Customs Sub-department is like other units of Customs, always enhancing the reform of administrative procedures, creating more favorable conditions for import-export activities of enterprises in the North Thang Long Industrial Park and neighboring areas”

The North Thang Long Industrial Park Customs Sub-department takes charge of State management on Customs for enterprises in the North Thang Long Industrial Park, Soc Son - Noi Bai Industrial North Park, Quang Minh Industrial Zone Park and some enterprises outside the industrial park. The Director Bach NHat Quang stated that enterprises doing procedures at the unit are 100% FDI enterprises, and the majority are Japanese. This is an advantage of the Unit because the FDI enterprises, especially Japanese enterprises must comply with the law. However, Customs officers must always actively understand the operation and build the industrial working style in the task of implementation.

In 2016, import-export activities and State budget revenues in the Sub-department increased impressively compared to the difficult situation of budget collection. The Sub-department was estimated to collect the State revenue of 956 billion vnd in 2016, at the end of 2016, the Sub-department collected about 1,150 billion vnd, reaching 126% of the target. With the area characteristics: enterprises operated stably and did not increase much about the quantity of enterprises doing the procedures, so what did the North Thang Long Industrial Park Customs Sub-department do to achieve such outstanding results in the import-export turnover and State revenue. Answering my question, the Director of sub-department acknowledged that one important factor was the trade facilitation for enterprises in development of production and business.

In order to collect correctly and fully and pay the collected tax amounts and other revenues to the State budget, besides urging to track debts, the unit also focused on studying, proposing and removing obstacles thereby developing revenue sources. Furthermore, the unit often urged and found out the situation of the task implementation of Customs officers in important operational steps such as: approach of the Customs declaration, management of taxable price, surveillance, HS code application; Examination of Post Clearance Audits; and anti-smuggling and anti-trade fraud

Creating measurements for performance’s efficiency

In the afternoon at the end of 2016 with the leaders of the North Thang Long Industrial Park Customs Sub-department, I was really impressed with the awareness of creating partner relationship and cooperation of the Customs unit in implementing Custom procedures for each specific step. The North Thang Long Industrial Park Customs Sub-department focused on applying the new Customs procedures under modern management methods on the basis of risk management principles in combination with IT application. Customs management not only met the increasing workload but also ensured good performance of Customs tasks in the area. I joked “Director was an experienced officer in risk management, so when he moved to the sub-department, his “occupational expertise" had a positive effect on both Customs and enterprises.

During the past two years, the North Thang Long Industrial Park Customs Sub-department supervised enterprises to evaluate the compliance of Customs officers. The objects supervised were large enterprises contributing 80% of Customs declarations at the Sub-department, thereby, evaluating each working position of Customs officers. The evaluation criteria are changed every year, in 2015, the criteria focused on evaluating the implementation of the Customs procedures of enterprises, in 2016, the criteria focused on responsibility of implementation of public works of Customs officers in each operational team on: processing time, qualifications to meet the work, behavior culture and working attitude. The supervision showed that most of answers were good assessments. Thereby, the Sub-department assessed accurately the task implementation of each steps and arranged appropriate and good officers, building trust from the business community.

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Talking about the support and cooperation of the Customs sub-department in recent time, many enterprises doing Customs procedures here have same comment: this is one of the Customs units with industrial working style. Enterprises always received specific support from the Customs Sub-department while handling Customs procedures from steps of announcing, consulting and answering questions on new regulations to handling procedures quickly and easily.