ISSUE 1 2010
THE IT SEcTION
Online system to banish excise paperwork
2011, after which the EMCS will operate throughout Europe. EU Commissioner
A new electronic Excise Movement and Control System (EMCS) went into operation in the EU on 1 April. It records the movement of products for which excise duties have still to be paid in real time and should help to reduce the financial and administrative burdens for traders. Authorities and traders will join the system progressively until 1 January
Algirdas Šemeta for Taxation and Customs Union, Audit and Anti-Fraud, said EMCS would help tackle fiscal fraud while cutting red tape and reducing compliance costs. It will replace the paper-based system
of Accompanying Administrative Documents (ADDs). These travel with the goods to their final destination where the recipient must acknowledge its receipt manually. EMCS replaces the paper AAD with
an electronic record – the e-AD - sent by the consigner to the final recipient,
via the EMCS systems in the member states of dispatch and destination. When the goods arrive, the recipient files an electronic report of receipt, which is sent to the consignor who then discharges the movement. Specialist wine forwarder JF Hillebrand’s operations director, Noel Collins said that the new EMCS system appeared to be working very well and that the company had been been accessing the new system to sign off e- ADs. He added: “It is, however, very early days and as of April 14 we have only had a small number of e-ADs to process, from Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. It is difficult to gauge at this moment how the system will perform during busier periods, or when more countries, particularly those in Western Europe, come online. However, our first impressions are that the system works well.”
27
ICE ready to come out of the chiller
Impatex MD Peter Day says he hopes to have the first functions of the Integrated Customs
for
Peter Day
Europe (ICE) system to clients from about May this year. The customs and freight software supplier has
been working on a new pan-European product aimed mainly at the corporate market and is planning a staged launch of the various functions that make up the ICE package over the next year. Unlike the existing Customs Manager (CM) product, ICE is based on functions rather than discrete modules. The first function, for NCTS (New Community Transit System) is currently being tested by Dover-based clearance agent Channel Port Forwarders. Peter Day explained: “Although not a
corporate client as such, the company handles a large number of NCTS clearances – more than most corporates – and so is an ideal test-bed for the new software. The package will then be tested by DSV, a corporate customer with a Dover office that also performs high volumes
of NCTS clearances .” Future functions to be added include NES (New Export System), EMCS (Export Movement Control System) and then Frontier imports towards the end of 2010. Duty management, CFSP (Customs Freight Simplified Procedures), bonded and non-bonded warehousing, IPR (Inward Processing Relief) and PCC (Processing under Customs Control) will follow, along with OPR (Outward Processing Relief), Intrastat, and RED (Registered Excise Dealer) at a later stage. CM users will be able to switch progressively
from CM to ICE on a function-by-function basis.
“The idea is that ICE will eventually completely replace CM for our corporate clients,” says Peter Day. “It will offer much broader scope, and will be completely multi- country and multi-lingual, capable of working in any EU country.” Because ICE uses SQL, a database server
product used by most modern business applications, its database is designed to be ‘self-maintaining’ without users needing to exit the system while data is re-indexed. ICE can run in either a Windows or a Web environment. Impatex’s non-corporate clients are already
being offered NetFreight which is a state-of- the-art, web-based, full-function forwarding and Customs system.
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