Leveraging customs services

The government has come up with an initiative, which may really ease the customs system and related proceedings.

The government has come up with an initiative to amend the law to stop the arbitrary decisions on part of customs service official at the borders to define prices of products and ask for additional documents. If this initiative is brought up and adopted as a law, it will be a very good development not only for businessmen but ordinary people as well. For example, there are people who may pay 2000 Euros to buy a car from Europe but pay 1000 Euro for customs registration upon importing to Armenia.

The problem is that the customs body does not take into account the invoice of the product when defining the customs price of a product but the defining prices they have in their books. This fact contains corruption risks and generates discontent among people. According to the proposed changes if importers show appropriate documents, the chances of the customs officers to maneuver will be reduced, thus corruption risks will be reduced as well.

The statement of the finance ministry writes that the proposed changes to the law on customs services and operations is aimed at improvement of the process of customs prices definition of imported products, simplification of customs procedures and reduction of time and money spent on it. The ministry of finance has also evaluated the expected results as a result of the law amendment, as well as the impact on the budget. “The proposed amendments will have neutral effect on the inflows to the budget,” writes the official statement of the ministry of finance. This is important because those against the bill may complain that unfair importers may trick and hit the budget income. For example, one may pay 10,000 for a car but arrange an invoice for 5,000 and pay less to the customs service. It seems that everyone should be happy but one of media outlets informs that the customs service is complaining. The customs services has offered formulas and techniques, which would even make the estimation procedure more complicated, but the government inclined the offer as it did not comply with the requirements of the World Trade Organization.

We were going to ask the customs body about the reasons opposing to the bill but they published a statement mentioning that the information published by that news agency was not true because the customs service, as a part of the government, had participated in developing and initiating the mentioned bill. The government representatives say that the customs body has really helped this process, but we will not go into the details of these discussions because even good initiatives may become topics of such discussions due to the environment in Armenia. Whatever is done, even a good or bad thing, the first thing we thing about is the bad because we think that something is hidden behind it and again someone will be cheated somewhere.

Going back to the law and its effect, we should mention that people should not get very happy about this bill. Certainly the parliament will adopt the government’s bill. However, it is a big question whether this will be used in real life or no. If the laws were the main driving force in our country, we would be one of the best countries in the world as we have very good laws; indeed the problem is that those are not used.