It’s necessary to include the reform principles of specialized management and inspection to the law revision

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Customs officers at Mong Cai Border Gate Customs Branch (Quang Ninh) inspects import and export goods. Photo: Q. Hung.

Ministry of Finance mentioned many problems in the management of import and export goods. For example, the promulgation of standards and technical regulations, as provided for in Paragraph 1 of Article 60 of the Law on Standards and Technical Regulations, ministries and ministerial level agencies, within the scope of their respective duties and powers, have the responsibility to elaborate, promulgate or submit to state competent agencies and competent persons to promulgate relevant legal documents on standards and technical regulations.

However, ministries and ministerial-level agencies have not elaborated, promulgated or submitted to competent authorities to promulgate sufficient legal documents guiding relevant standards to ensure the implementation thereof. Specifically, the technical standards for items in the potentially unsafe groups have not been promulgated or have not been fully promulgated, and the principles of product and goods management according to standards and technical regulations have not been unified.

Regarding the management of the list of goods subject to specialized inspection, according to the provisions of Article 70 of the Law on Product and Goods Quality, the management ministry shall be responsible for state management of product and goods quality according to their assigned fields, accordingly, ministries shall promulgate lists of goods and products. However, many items in the list are issued without HS codes, leading to difficulties to determine goods accurately and names of different lists such as: List of goods subject to specialized inspection, list of import and export goods under the license and subject to specialized management, list of goods with unsafety potential. Therefore, a product can be under many different lists and subject to many management methods by many agencies and organizations, which leads to overlapping management.

Regarding the specialized inspection method, the Ministry of Finance said that the exemption from inspection, according to the provisions in Clause 4, Article 27 of the Law on Product and Goods Quality, management ministries shall have to specify the exemption and reduction of quality inspection for products and goods which have been granted certificate of conformity, conformity announcement or certificate of application of advanced management systems according to regional and international standards. However, many ministries have not specified the exemption from inspection for these items, only stipulated the reduced inspection method, so the scope of specialized inspection before Customs clearance is still wide.

There is still a problem related to the agency in charge of specialized inspection. According to a provision in Clause 16, Article 3 of the Law on Product and Goods Quality, the agency in charge of specialized inspection is state agency. However, the State agency now authorizes a conformity assessment organization to carry out the inspection and notify the results to importers. Accordingly, the authorization will raise a number of inadequacies such as there is no legal basis for the authorization; there are no clear mechanisms for settlement in case that importers do not accept the assessment results by the organization authorized by the Ministries.

Therefore, the Ministry of Finance proposed amendments and supplements to the Law on Standards and Technical Regulations and the Law on Quality Products and goods in the following principles:

Only implementing pre-customs clearance audit for goods with highly unsafe potential and risk of spreading epidemics, endangering human health and life, polluting the environment, affecting social morality, customs and habits, and adversely affecting the national economy and security.

At the same time, implementing principles of risk management and classification of enterprises based on their legal compliance, classification of commodity groups with low/high risk to apply appropriate inspection method.

Legal documents should clearly stipulate the application of international practices in the specialized inspection for the following contents: mutual recognition; active acknowledge of foreign quality certificates for imported goods from developed countries and well-known brands.

Many measures to reform specialized inspection have been effective VCN - With the attention and direction of the Government, the Prime Minister and the initiative and ...

Particularly, the solution for socialization of specialized inspection should be strongly applied in the following direction: State agencies shall only be responsible for management, inspection, supervision, the inspection, assessment and verification shall be assigned to the conformity assessment organizations which are eligible for operation according to laws; the inspection results by the conformity assessment organizations shall be used for Customs clearance.