Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb.16
By Azad Hasanli - Trend:
State Customs Committee of Azerbaijan plans to sign agreements with Turkey and Kazakhstan in 2016 on exchange of preliminary information on goods and vehicles moving across the border, an official with the country's State Customs Committee told Trend.
"We have defined three priority lines as part of the strategy for ensuring the development of information technologies in the customs sphere. Improving the relations between the State Customs Committee and customs services of other countries is among them," Chief of Main Department for Activity Assessment and Development Programs of the State Customs Committee, customs service Major-General Igbal Babayev said.
Agreements have been signed with Uzbekistan, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine and Moldova on exchange of preliminary information on goods and vehicles moving from other countries to Azerbaijan and vice versa, he said.
"Currently, we are working out a similar project with Turkey, Iran, Kazakhstan and other CIS countries," Babayev added.
He noted that exchange of preliminary information speeds up the process of goods' passage across the border and will enable to use risk management to learn about the risks and minimize the risks of counterfeit goods beforehand.
Other two priority lines for developing the information technologies in the customs sphere are the improvement of "business-customs" and "customs-state" partnership, according to Babayev.
"We work for totally switching to full use of information technologies in the customs sphere," he added.
"At present, around 95 percent of the customs bodies' activity has been transferred to the e-platform," he said. "Thus, we indicated 14 e-services on our website as part of the business customs partnership. Nine of these services are also available on the e-government portal."
"We are using new information technologies in our services to eliminate the direct contacts of entrepreneurs with customs officials," he said. "Our main goal is to enable any entrepreneur and physical entities to solve their issues with the customs bodies on the spot."
Babayev added that at present, the e-declaration is being introduced.
"That is the only area where we are still using paper is filling in declarations," he said. "When we introduce this technology, it will be possible to say that we will completely pass to the e-basis while conducting customs transactions."
As for the relations between customs and other state agencies, Babayev said that almost all information in this direction is exchanged electronically.
"The matter rests in those state agencies, which are somehow involved in the customs clearance procedure," he said. "Some 14 state agencies are involved in our unified automated system of customs management."
"This allows collecting the entire information on the issued licenses, certificates, permits, forms, letters, etc. in our database," he said. "This, in its turn, ensures transparency in this direction."
Edited by SI