Ho Chi Minh City Customs: Offering a series of solutions against smuggling and fraud at the end of the year

	Ho Chi Minh City Customs: Strictly controlling the smuggling of drugs at border gate
	Ho Chi Minh City Customs processed over 1.2 million declarations
	Ho Chi Minh City Customs records over US$53 billion in trade turnover

Ho Chi Minh City Customs inspects import and export goods. Photo: T.H

Dozens of cases with criminal signs

According to Ho Chi Minh City Customs Department, in the first half of 2022, the unit handled 1,309 cases of customs law violations, up by 67% year-on-year.

The value of infringing goods totaled over VND1,961 billion, rising nearly 67%. Notably, in the above-mentioned violations, there were 26 violations showing criminal signs, which were transferred to the police agency for investigation and settlement.

Through the screening of goods, Ho Chi Minh City Customs Department discovered many cases of taking advantage of the risk management mechanism during goods clearance to perform channel selection, and cheating in customs declaration for tax fraud and evasion. In which, the main violations are enterprises intentionally declaring wrong names, quantities and codes of goods.

Especially, through the screening, Ho Chi Minh City Customs identified many questionable cases and sent pictures and information to the Customs agency - where the enterprise opens the customs declaration - for inspection, thus many serious violations were discovered and prosecuted.

According to Ho Chi Minh City Customs Department, between January and June, 2022, the unit requested to coordinate with other authorities to conduct pre-clearance screening for 11,788 containers, discovered 338 suspicious containers (accounting for 3.05%) and 74 containers of illegal offenses.

In addition, Ho Chi Minh City Customs Department has implemented channelization to issue customs inspection decisions for 1,682,709 customs declarations.

Of which, there were more than 60% of Green channel declarations; 34.12% of declarations in the Yellow channel and 5.83% declarations in the Red channel. Through the inspection of channelization, the unit detected 1,543 records of violations.

Besides the increasing infringing imported goods, Ho Chi Minh City Customs Department said that the situation of hiding drugs in non-commercial shipments is also a problem. The units detected more than 60 cases of drug-related violations, and seized more than 150kg of drugs.

Drugs seized by Ho Chi Minh City Customs Department in June 2022

Many key solutions

At the conference to review the work of the first six months of the year and perform the tasks for the last six months of 2022 held by Ho Chi Minh City Customs Department, the Director of the Ho Chi Minh City Customs Department Dinh Ngoc Thang asked the customs units to strengthen the fight against corruption, smuggling, trade fraud, illegal cross-border transportation of goods on all key routes and areas, focusing on banned goods, high-value goods, high-tax goods, conditional import and export goods.

In particular, the customs unit should pay attention to C/O fraud to take advantage of tax incentives, petroleum products and materials for petroleum production; drugs and medical equipment; general goods of all customs regimes of export processing and production, tax-free investment, independent transportation, temporary import for re-export, temporary export for re-import, border gate transfer, transit goods, goods in bonded warehouses, or goods sent via express service or goods in e-commerce transactions in order to prevent and handle violations in a timely manner.

The professional units promote their role of advising and warning about the prevention of smuggling and trade fraud; support efficient channelization; enhance their responsibility, and closely follow their management areas and understand procedures for prosecution, investigation, verification and handling of violations and avoid missing crimes. Violations with criminal signs must be promptly investigated, verified, prosecuted, or transferred to other agencies.

Identifying that the situation of illegal transportation of drugs by air and express as complicated, the leader of Ho Chi Minh City Customs Department requests to implement professional measures to control drugs and precursors at all stages, routes and areas.

At the same time, the customs units are asked to grasp the situation and have a new plan; effectively control enterprises importing chemicals, precursors and new drugs containing narcotics and psychotropic substances; and work with other agencies to prevent the use of precursors for the illegal production of narcotics.

Ho Chi Minh Customs Department will expand coordination with the Risk Management Department to improve the efficiency of identifying key points in the selection of goods inspection by container scanners, improve the detection rate of violations, and save costs; build a topic on risk management to enhance the effectiveness of identifying key points in the selection of goods inspection by container scanners.

Ho Chi Minh City Customs focuses on effectively implementing customs modernization

Regarding risk control and information collection and processing, Ho Chi Minh Customs Department will perform the role of information connection with the General Department of Customs and other authorities as well as actively collect and analyze information to provide warnings for units, increasing the efficiency of channelization, fight against smuggling and trade fraud; risk analysis and assessment for goods in independent transportation, and combined transportation (port transfer, border gate transfer, transit).