MINSK, 5 February (BelTA) - The Belarusian customs have significantly reduced the time of goods release in the past five years, Chairman of the State Customs Committee Vladimir Orlovsky told the media ahead of the meeting of the committee, BelTA has learned.
“Five years ago the release time of 90% of export goods was an hour. Today it does not exceed 5 minutes. In 93 cases out of 100 transit goods are released in less than 10 minutes, and in 2016 this figure was one and a half hours. Some 90% of import declarations for goods were to be issued within eight hours five years ago. Now they are issued in less than two hours," said Vladimir Orlovsky. The customs service plans to issue every second import declaration within an hour by the end of 2025.
Automation of customs operations is among the big contributors to the rapid reduction of release time. In 2020, the number of automatically-issued customs declarations reached 330,000, up 2.5 times from 2019. “At the end of 2020, 60% of export declarations were issued automatically. We registered certain growth in automatic issuance both in imports and transit. The figures are good,” the chairman of the State Customs Committee added.
The execution of the revenue part of the budget is one of the major tasks of the customs service. The 2020 target for customs payments to the national budget was overperformed by 2.6%. The total sum made up Br8.865 billion. “Belarusian companies involved in foreign economic activities worked really well. In 2020 we posted an increase across almost every type of customs payments in comparison to 2019. The only indicator we failed to meet was export customs duties. This however was due to the tax maneuver introduced in the Russian oil industry,” explained Vladimir Orlovsky.
X-ray cargo inspection systems are a good tool to detect offences. They have over Br40 benefits per Br1 costs. The use of the cargo inspection systems brought more than Br10 million to the country's budget in 2020.
