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E-clearance still faces roadblocks
After three years, e-clearance implementation remains at trial levels in Hai Phong and HCM City, with the main reasons hindering the expansion of e-clearance to all cities and provinces being a lack of synchronous investment at strategic levels, said officials from the General Customs Department.
So far there were only 410 enterprises participating in the experimental programme for e-clearance, with total import-export capital worth US$2 billion. This was really a small number compared to the 300,000 enterprises in the country, whose total import-export values were worth $48 billion, according to the head of the Information Technology Department (under the General Customs Department), Nguyen Cong Binh.
Binh said that the primary hindrance to the expansion of e-clearance was that numerous mechanisms were still not suitable to apply information technology to customs procedures. The customs sector also lacked strategies for investments in modernising customs sectors, and lacked synchronicity in applying information technology to procedures in related sectors.
Though the E-transaction Law has been valid and the Government has issued Decree No 27 to guide the implementation of the law, many offices and enterprises were still very slow in applying e-transactions.
"Many of the regulations have not been made uniform among the different sectors to implement e-transactions," said Pham Cong Minh, deputy head of the Department of Information Technology and Financial Statistics (under the Ministry of Finance).
Another hindrance in implementing e-transactions was the lack of a State agency which regulated and certified the legal value of an e-signature, which was why e-transaction procedures were still incomplete, Minh said. Without certification for e-signatures, e-clearance would not be implemented.
The officials said the final hindrance was a lack of synchronicity in applying information technology to all of the activities of relevant ministries and sectors. To implement e-clearance, all related sectors such as tax offices, State treasuries and sea port administrations would need to examine statistics in e-customs procedures before customs officials at border gates would allow clearance.
But so far, the competence of information technology in ministries and sectors was very different. Even the computer systems of the financial sector, the General Tax Department and the State Treasury did not have a common database.
Due to these hindrances, e-clearance could be implemented only for enterprises that imported and exported commodities that did not need to be checked for receipts. In such cases, e-clearance has really had a positive effect on procedure times, from 5-10 minutes over the 7-8 hours previously.
Binh said the General Customs Department would now allow export and processing enterprises to benefit from e-clearance, instead of only import-export enterprises as before. These efforts would require a large investment sum, he said.
Binh said the customs sector had implemented a programme to modernise itself comprehensively, with capital worth $80 million borrowed from the World Bank.
The e-clearance development programme was part of the modernisation programme, he added.
VNS
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