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The Deputy Director General Vu Ngoc Anh speaks at the meeting. Photo: N. Hien.

Speaking at the meeting, the Deputy Director General Vu Ngoc Anh said that in addition to the assessment reports on the work of Customs post-clearance audits, the meeting also included the topics on the work of Customs post-clearance audits on value, HS codes, outsourcing and some policies on imports and exports, dossier examination, processing of information, documents, settlement of complaints and handling of violations. The conference also introduced some new contents such as: The Decree amending and supplementing some articles of Decree 08, Circular amending some articles of Circular 38, thereby explaining to the delegates new orientations in the field of Customs post-clearance audits.

The Deputy Director General also noted issues on how to improve the quality of inspections, reduce complaints about results of Customs post-clearance audits. In addition, the meeting mentioned a matter of professional procedures issued with Circular 38, which specified the responsibilities of the assignor and the person which were assigned the tasks. In particular, the new procedure also provided disciplinary action in the case where a person is assigned a task but fails to do so.

At the meeting, Director of Department of Customs post-clearance audits, Mr. Duong Phu Dong said, under the close guidance of the Government and the Ministry of Finance, Customs concentrated all resources to implement drastic solutions to implement the assigned tasks. In 2017, the General Department of Vietnam Customs completed its excellent work on all aspects, including the work of Customs post-clearance audits.

Specifically, in the year 2017, the total force of Customs post-clearance audits accomplished 8990 examination cases, including 1,268 cases at the Customs office (reaching 102% of assigned targets). This resulted in 5,469 violations (accounting for nearly 61% of the total). The total amount of imposed tax and fines for administrative violations was nearly VND 2,455 billion and the actual state budget reached VND 2,232 billion (112% of the target set for 2017 was VND 2,000 billion).

The Ministry of Finance has guided enterprises to raise awareness of law observance, prevent violations in a timely fashion, actually collect tax arrears and fines for the State budget, while summing up timely problems and inadequacies to amend and supplement policies.

However, there are still some problems with Customs post-clearance audits. Specifically, the activities of Customs post-clearance audits focus mainly on areas such as code, price, processing, without promoting other sectors such as temporary import for re-export, C/O, and policy on items. Specifically, the actual revenues collected through Customs post-clearance audits only account for 18.3% of the total revenues of the whole sector.

Customs paid 1,034.3 billion VND of Customs post-clearance audits to State budget VCN- This is a remarkable result of Customs post-clearance audits, which contributes significantly to the task of ...

In terms of value, despite the positive results, the target of Customs post-clearance audits is not met. The revenues from Customs post-clearance audits in terms of new value reached about 28% of the total revenues, while the target is about 40%. Many cases with low declaration prices have not been implemented yet. The performance of the Customs post-clearance audits on the value of some big Customs Departments is still low.