HCM City Customs strengthens inspection of goods through scanners

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HCM City Customs officers inspect goods using scanners. Photo: T.H

To create favorable conditions for import-export businesses in 2022, HCM City Customs Department issued guiding documents on applying control measures to identify high-risk items and businesses on the basis of frequency and level of violations, and enhancing the information exchange between units.

In just a month (from January 15 to February 15), the Customs Department requested coordination to screen 740 containers before customs clearance. Of which, 620 containers were screened before customs clearance. As a result, customs identified 29 containers with suspicious signs.

Moreover, the Customs Department implemented the channelization to issue a decision on customs inspection for 218,278 import-export declarations including 133,595 Green Channel declarations (accounting for 61.2%); 74,562 Yellow Channel declarations (accounting for 34.16%); and 10,121 Red Channel 10,121 declarations (accounting for 4.64%). As a result, the customs authority detected 226 violations.

Recently, the situation of taking advantage of the risk management mechanism in goods clearance to perform channel selection, cheating in customs declaration, for the purpose of fraud and tax evasion has been a problem.

HCM City Customs Department has detected and prevented many cases of enterprises intentionally declaring the wrong name, quantity, and code of goods for tax evasion, missing hundreds of millions of dong in tax for the State budget.

Thao Khoa Import-Export Trading Service Co., Ltd (District 3, Ho Chi Minh City) is as an example. This company opened an export declaration of 13.5 tons of aluminum alloy in the form of unwrought ingots, cooked from cans by melting and casting, with an export tax rate of 5%. The declared value of goods was over VND486 million. Through documentary checking, Saigon port area 1 Customs Branch detected suspicious signs and transferred the physical inspection of the goods, and took samples for assessment. As a result, the actual exported goods were 24 tons of copper alloy, raw ingot form; 15% export tax rate.

The value of infringing goods was over VND3.8 billion; the tax difference was over VND550 million. HCM City Customs Department took the case to the court and transferred it to HCM City Police.

HCM City Customs Department is equipped with five container scanners by the General Department of Customs. These scanners are distributed to three border gate units and are applying the minimum screening norm for each scanner according to Official Letter 83/TCHQ-GSQL dated 19 February 2021 of the General Department of Customs.

In order to promote the efficiency of the scanners, HCM City Customs Department assigned professional units to coordinate to increase the screening rate to ensure both strict control of import and export goods and facilitate customs clearance.

The current screening is not only for sending scanned images to customs units where businesses open declarations in order to identify violations, but also for deterring enterprises at risk of violation, because when a list of scanned containers has been publicized on the website of the General Department of Customs, enterprises will know that they have been screened and may have a sense of declaring the true information of imported goods, said HCM City Customs.

In addition, the screening process according to Decision 3272/QD-TCHQ has the content that "Screening of goods through a container scanner is a measure to check and assess the compliance with the law of the customs declarant”.

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Thus, screening of import and export containers before customs clearance is not only for detecting violations but also as a measure to check and assess the law compliance of customs declarants.