The Lithuanian Customs Practitioners Association (LCPA) is a very dynamic organization which publishes a journal called the Customs Compliance & Risk Management Journal for Practitioners. To … stimulate the exchange of ideas between Journal contributors, the Association decided to create a writers’ group which met online for the first time on 18 August 2020. Customs specialists from various backgrounds shared their perspectives on the issues they perceived to be important in their respective countries or areas of work. This article highlights some of these issues and invites you to read the Journal to learn more about the writers’ views.

Adam Smith, author of “The Wealth of Nations”, wrote that Customs duties have been “in use for time immemorial”. To a large extent, this assertion is correct. The practice of taxing commerce … is as old as commerce itself. And where a tax must be collected, there will be disputes over rates and methods.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the entry into force of the WTO Customs Valuation Agreement (CVA). The Agreement seeks to tackle Customs clearance delays resulting from valuation verification … and to ensure that the Customs value of goods entering a market are properly assessed to reflect the actual price of the goods as agreed between the buyer and seller.

Following World War II, like-minded nations sought to create a global trading system that could help foster peace and prosperity through greater economic integration. This effort spawned the … General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which required its members to bind their tariffs at lower levels and apply them in a non-discriminatory way (meaning if you give a concession to one country, you give it to them all).

A significant amount of work has been done over the last 15 years on “convergence” of income tax transfer pricing (TP) and Customs valuation. Both income tax and Customs rules seek the same result, … ensuring that prices between related parties are “at arm’s length,” set as if the parties were unrelated. But the rules are different. Income tax TP rules in the majority of countries are based on guidelines established by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD. Customs valuation principles are established in the WTO Valuation Agreement (Agreement). Moreover, the revenue collection focal points of tax and Customs administrations are different: a high transfer price generally results in a high duty, but low income tax; a low transfer price results in lower duties and higher income taxes.

The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and the WCO have a history of long and close co-operation in the area of Customs valuation. As the institutional representative of more than 45 million … businesses in over 100 countries, ICC has been participating as an Observer in the meetings of the Technical Committee on Customs Valuation since 1979. In that time, the ICC Observer delegation has had the opportunity to explain specific aspects of commercial practice in terms of their influence on Customs valuation, as well as to engage with Customs representatives on specific technical issues. In this article, ICC highlights some of the challenges and questions arising from implementation of valuation rules, highlighting the important work of the Technical Committee.

Advance rulings relating to the determination of tariff classification and origin of goods are already established in several countries, but few have implemented such a system in the field of … Customs valuation. Such rulings do not determine or confirm the actual Customs value of a particular consignment but indicate the treatment to apply to certain elements of the Customs value. In this article, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) explains the processes and procedures relating to this powerful trade facilitation tool which benefits both the administration and trade operators.

In the EU, the “simplification for the determination of amounts being part of the Customs value of the goods” under the transaction value method allows operators to avoid the burden of a two-step … declaration – i.e. a simplified declaration followed by a supplementary declaration – and to finalise Customs valuation declarations without delay in situations where there is no risk for the collection of import duties. Such simplifications are becoming increasingly relevant given the growing number of value elements, such as royalties or commissions, that cannot be quantified at the time of importation.

Several government and private stakeholders are involved in the clearance of imported food products. To ensure a smooth process, close coordination and sharing of information backed by robust … information technology (IT) processes are needed. With this in mind, India’s food safety agency has mapped Customs Nomenclature codes with Food Safety and Standards Regulations, a move which has enabled further integration of IT systems and better risk management.

The WCO Secretariat has published an update of the Comparative Study on certification of origin, the previous version of which was issued in 2014, in order to take into consideration new trends … both on non-preferential and preferential origin.