Survey on Declaration of Customer Service: Looking at the facts

Customs agencies are implementing many solutions to improve the quality of customer service. Photo: S.T.

Focusìng on commitments not yet assessed

According to the Customs Modernization Reform Commission, this survey focuses on commitments that have not been assessed or need additional assessment. Because, through previous reviews, some of the commitments in the Declaration of Customer Service have been assessed by the business community and customs agencies through a number of previous surveys. There are some solutions issued by The General Department of Customs improved commitments that have not been appreciated by the business community in the Action Plan of The General Department of Customs on the tasks and solutions to improve the performance of customs agencies in order to improve Hai's assessment indicators in the year 2017 in Decision 2275 / QD-TCHQ dated 12/7/2017.

The contents of this survey include: General commitment of Transparency: Implementing mechanism of ensuring the supervision of customers for customs operations; Specific commitments of the time limit to carry out customs procedures are the time limit for completion of examination of dossiers and actual goods inspection.

Up to the time of survey, the Customs agencies has collected 857 feedback from representatives of enterprises. Enterprises have received feedback from different roles in enterprises such as import-export officials, directors, and legal experts. Most of the enterprises have experience in implementing customs procedures, specifically: 63% of businesses have experience of over 5 years, 32% of enterprises have experience from 1 to 5 years. A small percentage, about 5% of businesses have experience of less than 1 year. Most of them carry out customs procedures by themselves, up to 83% of enterprises. The percentage of enterprises authorized agents and other organizations and individuals to carry out customs procedures is relatively low, 10% and 7%, respectively.

According to the assessment of the customs office, with the statistics, the structure of enterprises surveyed covered most of the industries, in which the number of large enterprises with the capital of over 100 billion accounts with quite a high percentage (34%). 63% of surveyed enterprises have experience in customs clearance (over 5 years), while most of them carry out customs procedures (83%). The interviewees are importers and exporters (73%). Therefore, the customs office can be sure of the feedback received directly from import-export enterprises and experienced exporters in the implementation of customs procedures (the number of agents and organizations entrusted only a small proportion)

Recognition from both sides

With specific indicators, the survey also collected a lot of positive comments from enterprises. For example, for the norm of complete duration of regular examination of documents (2 hours from the time to receiving full dossier), there were 844 replies about the implementation of this commitment, of which 98% assessed implementation as accurate and quicker than commitment, and only 2% were slower than commitment. Some causes of delay were assessed by the enterprises included: customs officers were too slow slow, many yellow flow profiles, and problems arising from both the customs and enterprises.

For the norms of completion of the actual inspection of normal goods (8 hours from the time of full presentation of goods), there were 854 respondents. There were more than 99% of respondents that assessed implement as more accurate and faster than the commitment. For the criterion of complete duration of physical inspection for goods needing specialized inspection (8 hours from the time of received results to specialized inspection ), there were 837 respondents, with most of them assessing it as accurate and faster than commitment (more than 99%). With the criteria of complete duration of physical inspection of goods in large quantity, for multiple categories or complicated inspection (not exceeding 2 days), there were 826 respondents, most of them assessed they finished in time and faster than commitment.

In addition, most of the enterprises also expressed their agreement with the custom’s commitment such as: commitment on appearance, costume of customs officers, with 96.38% agreement; commitment on attitude and behavior, with 98.02% agreement; the criteria in the commitment to support customers have been approved by the company at about 97%/

In addition to surveying the opinion of the business community, Customs also noted the opinion of the local customs on the implementation of the Declaration of service to customers. Most of the customs agencies assessed their officials as conscious, who work according to the mottos and commitments that are set out in the Declaration of service to customers; implementing mechanisms to ensure the supervision of customers for customs operations; reducing the rate of actual goods inspection, administrative fee and clearance time. However, there are still shortcomings as some civil servants are not really aware of their significance, as well as their role of responsibility in striving to implement the guideline of action and commitment in the Declaration.

From the point of view of the Customs Department, enterprises have been cooperating actively and contributing their opinions to the customs offices in handling affairs and improving service quality. Fair compliance; most of the them obey and fulfill their tax obligations. However, according to the opinion of local customs, some enterprises have not yet mastered the knowledge of customs law, declaring inaccurate and a lack of information. Partially due to the limited knowledge of staff about the import-export procedures, the customs officers have to guide many times, consuming more time and effort. At the same time, there aren’t many enterprises research documents, only to find out when the problem arises. Some enterprises have relied on the customs office, looking forward to support, inspecting procedures, policies and tariffs from the Customs, so they did not pay attention to legal knowledge, improve skills in declaring customs, often declared incorrectly, incompletely, with unclear information about goods that customs officers have to guide, check many times, which affects clearance time.