Sugar anti-smuggling through dossiers

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Sugar smuggling at Kien Giang border.

Sugar smuggling has place for a long time on the South-west border with a series of perpetrators being arrested and prosecuted. However, sugar smuggling still occurred openly last year and smuggling activities are forecast to be more complicated in 2017. Why has sugar smuggling still occurred openly without being prevented by functional forces? This is a question to which that all localities are still looking for answers.

According to the Kien Giang Customs Department, during the fight against smuggling of sugar in the province, functional forces have faced many difficulties because most illegal enterprises and businesses have import dossiers or invoices. Accordingly, the owners of smuggled sugar have hired local residents to use motorcycles to transport white sugar from Cambodia to its own warehouses in the area of ​​Ha Tien town, then splitting sugar and changing the labels in order to legalize smuggled sugar. In the case where they were detected by functional forces, they presented domestic invoices or import invoices of sugar in Vietnam to cope with the functional forces.

The Kien Giang Customs Department said that through discussion with the relevant authorities such as the Market Management force and the Police force, they have the same problems that many functional forces faced and they had no effective measures to fight and prevent. In 2016, authorities of Kien Giang Province requested functional authorities to manage enterprises by checking invoices before they transported sugar into their warehouses. However, the Tax office said that this regulation was wrong and illegal (because these enterprises had import invoices).

In Dong Thap, sugar smuggling was quite similar. Accordingly, perpetrators illegally transported sugar from the border area to ​​Hong Ngu town, then splitting sugar, changing the labels and transporting smuggled sugar to the domestic market by truck. In addition, perpetrators used the auction records to legalize smuggled sugar and deal with the functional forces when they were inspected. This was a common trick but till now, there have been no effective solutions of functional forces in the fight against these perpetrators.

Immediately after seizing smuggled sugar, functional forces evaluated smuggled sugar in accordance with the Law on Handling Administrative Violations. However, in fact, perpetrators always want to buy the auction records of sugar, so they are ready to buy these records regardless of price. Then, they have used these auction records to legalize smuggled sugar to deal with anti-smuggling forces.

In order to prevent this situation, authorities of An Giang Province have proposed to the Government not to sell auction records of sugar for retailers and individuals, but only for local enterprises processing sugar in the province.

On the other hand, there have been no specific criteria to determine or distinguish domestic white sugar from smuggled sugar. Because most perpetrators used tricks to change the packaging and labels to cope with functional forces. Therefore, there is a need for a close collaboration between local manufacturers and functional forces in the handling of violated cases.

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In the long term, domestic enterprises should innovate and improve quality of sugar to enhance their competitiveness. Thus, customers will choose domestic sugar products, and smuggled sugar will be eliminated in the domestic market.