Hold on, before blaming it on the OGAs!

It is common since many years already that the global customs community is pointing their “blaming finger” to other government agencies – OGAs – when it comes to identifying root causes behind too long cargo release times at sea ports and other border crossing points, high costs for importers and exporters to conduct international trade, and so forth. Now, without denying this as a plausible scenario, the CBRA research team proposes to take one step backwards, by first building a solid framework for analyzing and deeply understanding what is actually happening at the borders with Customs and all the other agencies, before rushing to conclusions on “who is to be blamed for poor / expensive cross-border performance…”. Therefore – for both educational purposes (FP7-CORE, work package 19.1) and for analytical purposes (Border Agency Cooperation study with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, OIC), we have produced the following “universal border control task list” – naturally understanding that a perfect single universal list cannot exist. The list is first exploited during April-May 2016 in the OIC Embassy survey (here in Switzerland), to explore who is responsible for specific cross-border controls in various OIC member countries, and to what extent customs is performing tasks on behalf of other (border) agencies. Later, we plan to use the this as a “de-facto border agency control check-list” in our future studies, across the globe.

Again, the first step before analyzing which agencies to blame, is all about understanding what are the typical cross-border control tasks all about, considering all three task categories:

• Border control tasks which typically cover all commodities;
• Border control tasks which typically focus on specific commodities; and
• Other border agency control areas.

Now, lets go through all three of them, starting with the first one, and followed by the other two:

Border control tasks which typically cover all commodities:

• Calculation and collection of indirect border taxes:
  • customs duties
  • sales / value added taxes
  • excise taxes
• Calculation and collection of other import/ transit/ export fees and taxes (e.g. environmental fee at export)
• Compilation of trade statistics

Border control tasks which typically focus on specific commodities:

• Control of import quota restricted products
• Calculation and granting of export subsidies
• Control of product safety / conformity of goods / trading standards (please separate agencies per product category, if necessary)
• Control of food, drinks, cigarettes, pharmaceuticals (including for general health and safety purposes)
• Control of energy related materials / products (e.g. oil and coal, could be for export taxation purposes etc.)
• Enforcement of intellectual property rights / fight against copyright infringements / anti-counterfeit
• Control of plant diseases, pests and extraneous species (i.e., phytosanitary controls)
• Animal quarantine and controls (i.e. veterinary controls, including pet controls)
• Control of any biohazards (including deliberate ones)
• Control of CITES protected species (i.e. endangered fauna and flora)
• Control of natural resources under license requirements, harvesting quotas etc. (including specific fish, wood, minerals, diamonds etc.)
• Control of cultural artifacts (stolen / looted, and/or illicitly traded)
• Control of any stolen goods (including vehicles, machinery, cargo etc.)
• Fight against drugs / illicit narcotics trafficking (including pre-cursors)
• Control of waste flows (including those in the Basel Convention on transboundary movements)
• Control of dual use / strategic goods
• Control of dangerous goods / hazardous materials
• Control of explosives and weapons:
  • explosives (including pre-cursors)
  • small arms and light weapons
  • defense / war materials
• Control of nuclear and radioactive materials

Other border agency control areas:

• Conveyance / cargo transport security and safety controls:
  • for maritime, including sea ports
  • for aviation, including airports
  • other modes: road, rail, inland waterways etc.
• Traveler, crew and immigration controls:
  • visa and passport controls
  • trafficking of human beings and people smuggling
  • asylum seekers
  • passenger cars and vehicles in terms of temporary admission
• Control of weight of cargo (including for road safety purposes)
• Cash controls (cash smuggling and counterfeit currency)
• Cyber security (customs and supply chain IT systems, critical infrastructure IT etc.)

Dear CBRA Blog and CBRA Monthly readers: we kindly invite your inputs to make the list more comprehensive / better in the future, so please send us an email with your ideas, to cbra@cross-border.org . And thanks already now to the multiple experts from national Customs administrations and international organizations for your valuable help so far– it has been great working with you on all these studies, keeping them as pragmatic as possible… (detailed acknowledgements will be published later). And it goes without saying that soon we will start looking on the next-step aspects on customs versus other government agencies, in the context cross-border supply chain costs and delays – please stay tuned for more!