Hai Phong customs warns of new and sophisticated smuggling tricks

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Deputy Director of Hai Phong Customs Department Nguyen Sy Trang speaks at the Conference. Photo: T.Binh.

Complicated developments

Hai Phong port area has a very large annual flow of import and export goods. Therefore, along with solutions to facilitate trade, Hai Phong Customs Department always focuses on strengthening the fight against smuggling.

From management practice, Deputy Director Nguyen Sy Trang said that criminal activities in the field of import and export always tend to be complicated, with many potential risks, causing loss of tax revenue for the State, greatly affecting security, order, social safety and economic development of the country.

In addition to traditional tricks, criminals are increasingly using many sophisticated methods and tricks such as: taking advantage of regulations that businesses must submit customs declarations for exported goods no later than four hours before the means of transport exits, so the criminals wait nearly the time to bring goods into the customs supervision area. This makes it difficult for inspection, supervision and risk assessment of large quantities of goods in a short time.

In addition, there is a phenomenon when an enterprise opens a customs declaration, the customs clearance system automatically classifies the shipment into the Red channel (physical inspection), the enterprise immediately cancels the declaration to re-declare a new declaration (including changing information compared to the initial Red channel declaration) to avoid customs inspection.

On the other hand, criminals take advantage of social networks, especially social networks whose servers are located in a third country with high security such as Instagram, Viber, Telegram, WhatsApp, Wechat... to conduct transactions. When being discovered and arrested, criminals deny responsibility, so it is difficult for the Customs to take professional measures to verify and collect evidence from the transactions via social networks.

Notably, Hai Phong Customs discovered the situation of establishing new businesses to import and export infringing goods for foreigners...

Proactively and promptly preventing violations

Facing with the above situation, Hai Phong Customs Department has developed and synchronously deployed many effective solutions to promptly prevent and strictly handle violations.

Specifically, the department has closely followed the plans of Steering Committee 389 at all levels and the direction of the General Department of Customs to focus on building plans and solutions to fight smuggling in accordance with the actual situation

Promulgating regulations on coordination in the fight against smuggling, trade fraud, counterfeit goods and handling of violations with signs of crime at Hai Phong Customs Department to ensure effective coordination among units and meet task requirements and actual situations.

Proactively working closely with authorities inside and outside the industry to strengthen patrols and control on maritime routes; sharing, collecting information, screening, and classifying subjects as a basis for building focus key plans to fight and handle violations of customs laws according to regulations.

Given by the drastic and synchronous solutions mentioned above, in the first six months of 2024, Hai Phong Customs Department has achieved a number of significant achievements in preventing and combating smuggling. In particular, the entire Department handled 409 cases of administrative violations, with a total fine of VND17.8 billion and an estimated value of evidence of about VND2,047 billion. In particular, a number of complex violations related to ivory, scrap steel, etc were discovered.