Effective measures against smuggling through risk management information in HCMC Customs

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The importation of Chinese goods with Vietnamese origin of Talalay Vietnam Rubber Co., Ltd. has been criminally prosecuted. Photo: T.H

Many smuggling tricks

With particular state management in the area, there are many seaports, international airports and international post offices centralizing import and export activities at 12 border gate and customs gate units with more than 53,000 enterprises carrying out customs procedures. In order to ensure both favorable conditions for trade activities and strict management of import and export goods, the HCMC Customs Department has applied effective risk management. Especially, regarding smuggling and trade fraud in the management area of ​​Ho Chi Minh City Customs Department, the situation is complicated and disruptive, and there are many new forms of fraud such as origin fraud, trademark fraud, infringing intellectual property rights (IPR), taking advantage of outsourcing production activities in export, transit, trading in border-gate transfer to evade measures of trade protection and economic protection, transportation of illegal goods, effective management information have helped the unit control the situation.

The violations discovered by the HCMC Customs Department in the past year show that the common tricks are taking advantage of the risk management mechanisms in the clearance of goods, with smugglers using the "channel selection" method. That is, the same lot of goods declared in the same branch or different branches, if the red channel, cancel the declaration, select yellow channel, or green channel to clear the goods. Along with that, some businesses intentionally declare multiple items, but only one item and vice versa in order to evade taxes or intentionally declare other products with low taxes, low prices to criteria for risk of channeling. Green, Yellow, Red (the test rate of 5-10 percent) or deliberately making very high taxes, but including banned goods, fake goods or conditional imports.

In order to evade the customs administration's management measures, the suspects set up many companies, stated the wrong addresses, businesses did not have signs, and often changed their headquarters. After being discovered, the subjects took other companies to declare customs to cause difficulties in the information screening work of the Customs offices.

Emerging problems of origin fraud

In particular, emerging in recent times is the situation of taking advantage of openness, creating favorable conditions for trade in processing, export production, transit, border-gate transfer to fraudulent origin, counterfeiting trademarks, transporting goods illegally and evasion of trade remedies.

The act of misleading goods origin has recently been complicated. Some businesses imported Chinese goods but labeled them as having Vietnamese origin to deceive consumers. For exports, businesses use many tricks to attach the origin of Vietnamese goods to countries with preferential tax rates for Vietnamese goods such as the US and European countriescausing serious consequences fordomestic production and national prestige.

Facing that situation, Ho Chi Minh City Customs Department has focused on deploying and immediately building programs and plans to fight, inspect and control to promptly prevent acts of evading trade defense measures, fraud, counterfeiting origin, labeling of goods and illegal transmission. The unit has organized inspection, discovered and prosecuted three cases of origin fraud.

Ho Chi Minh City Customs Department held a screening of 10,344 containers, an increase of 296 percent compared to the same period in 2018, suspected 126 containers with violations. Thereby, a number of major violations were discovered such as Tung Duong Company imported containers containing used air conditioning units, belonging to goods banned from import; Hoang Van Tung Company imported cabinets, stoves and refrigerators.But this company did not declare the origin or trademark; Tan Hao Khang Co., Ltd incorrectly declared the number of imported Lipton tea bags, in order to tax fraud.

Risk control focuses on key subjects VCN - Through information collection, the customs risk management authority has released a warning about high-risk shipments, ...

The fight against smuggling and trade fraud in 2019 has been actively and drastically implemented by Ho Chi Minh City Customs Department, promptly detected and arrested many major cases with complex and dangerous levels,contributing to preventing loss of state budget revenue, protecting the interests of people and enterprises and ensuring socio-economic security.