ICC CUSTOMS SECURITY TOOLKIT

Current widespread concerns for security have brought the quality of border management to the forefront of public attention. A number of national proposals are in hand to revise and strengthen relevant control agencies. Customs are central to all of them.

It follows that there will be keen official, public and private interest in the extent to which individual Customs services are able and equipped to meet the extra load of the many new regulatory and co-operative requirements and objectives likely to be cast on them.

A detailed assessment will call for in-depth enquiries and careful analysis. There will, however, very often, be an earlier stage at which the main need is for a rapid survey to throw up an initial profile, to identify possible need for additional concern or enquiry.

The ICC Customs Guidelines provide an ideal and well-tried framework for such preliminary profiling.

This Toolkit assembles those ICC Customs Guidelines and Explanatory Notes that are especially relevant to, and useful for, a rapid assessment of the quality of Customs security management. It can also help signpost priorities for improvement.

It is inevitable, given the intimate functional relationship between the two concepts that this Toolkit overlaps substantially that already available for Integrity.

There are, however, significant differences and, though itself essential to all Customs operations, integrity, lacking back up in efficiency and resources, cannot suffice as a reliable basis for information and consignment security.

Security is totally dependent on the attention and operational quality of all levels of staff.

Quality of the Customs Workforce (Guideline 3) is, therefore, a primary security factor. In this context, small routine extortions by operational staff, often regarded as cultural eccentricities, become completely unacceptable. An officer who, for a small bribe is willing to wave through a container full of washing powder may give the same facility, unknowingly, to a load of explosives for a terrorist.

On the other hand, excessive, rigidified controls can halt legitimate trade in its tracks and hamstring import/export performance and profitability, particularly for smaller businesses with very limited managerial resources and global companies dependent on finely-tuned "just in time" supply, production and distribution systems.

Technical assistance to Customs seeking to improve workforce standards ought, therefore, to include proven means of combining control with facilitation by, for example, Automated Information (Guideline 35) and Automated Risk Assessment (Guideline 36) systems.

Sound staff morale calls for and demonstrates good senior management. High standards here will be reflected in, and stimulated by, production and implementation of a published Strategic Plan and an internal Annual Management Plan as set out in Guideline 1.

An Internal Security Unit (Guideline 4) is a basic resource and related measures, in the same Guideline, and in Guideline 5 (Staff Identification) to assist confidence building with the commercial community, will be beneficial to Customs in all normal operations as well as security control.

The same expert investigation staff referred to in Guideline 6 on Fraud Investigation will be particularly valuable in helping Customs, in countries at all stages of development, to detect and deal with the equally complicated money laundering and illicit-drug related transactions which often accompany and finance terrorist activities.

Guideline 9 (Pre-arrival Entry and Post-entry Audit) is at the heart of advanced security strategy, combining the latest e-commerce practices with rapidly extending Customs-to Customs routine co-operation.

Reception of critical control information, well in advance of the arrival of the goods, gives Customs, at import, invaluable extra time to up-date and enlarge their databases and use risk assessment profiling and targeting to select suspect consignments and persons.

The now well-established practice of shedding more detailed fiscal data, with little or no relevance to security, to later processing by post entry audit procedures, is a major operational convenience for Customs, traders and carriers.

Compulsory port or airport warehousing, still common in countries addicted to profitable monopolies or supplementary tax-raising devices, presents obvious security risks which could be avoided if traders were free to arrange uninterrupted inward or onward movement, in accordance with Guideline 13.

Automated risk-assessment, applied, in accordance with Guideline 14, to select consignments for documentary and physical inspection benefits legitimate traders with high-quality compliance records and enables Customs to use scarce expert staff resources and often very expensive Non-intrusive Inspection equipment (Guideline 17) to the best security advantage.

Governments have already seen Convergence of Official Controls, advocated in Guideline 20 mainly for facilitation reasons, as a basic security requirement and benefit. Information can be pooled, common data bases can be better managed and exploited and staff can acquire and deploy shared expertise.

Trade will expect governments bringing about such convergence to give due priority and precedence to Customs services, who understand modern trading and transport practices and can take these into account when identifying the best ways to secure commercial co-operation in ensuring the highest security standards.

Such sound, long-established Customs/trade relations are also an ideal background for optimal use of the facilities for contacting Customs and reporting suspicious circumstances referred to in Guideline 4.

Tightened security precautions and requirements could well extend to Customs transit procedures. This, in turn, could aggravate and degrade the already difficult position of the many, often developing, and economies wholly or largely dependent on transit traffic.

It will be especially important for them and those trading with them that security agencies should take full advantage of the Transit measures set out in Guidelines 25 and 26 to ensure that improved border control goes hand in hand with enhanced facilitation.

Effective security in international trade operations calls for commercial understanding and co-operation reaching well beyond bare compliance with legal obligations. Such regulations must be enforced and may need to be strengthened, but enforcement agencies already know, from experience in fighting illicit drugs, the salient value of additional advice, intelligence and information from those engaged in the actual trade transaction.

In any event, a Customs service, at import, where security risks are greatest, cannot exercise any direct regulatory authority over goods or persons in another country or at some other point, prior to arrival.

It follows that Guidelines 29, (Consultation with the Trade) and 30, (Memoranda of Understanding), are of special importance in providing a systematic and sustained background of favourable Customs/trade relationships at the national level.

Attempts at individualistic, unilateral imposition of security regulations, taking no account of wide variations in national circumstances, capabilities and resources may achieve short-term results. Over time, however, as economic, social and political influences are allowed to operate, the only reliable basis will prove to be broad, global acceptance of a few basic security principles and requirements. These can be proposed and, to some extent, enforced by governments with especially acute security motivation and strong economic influence, but, in the long run, reliable global security policy will depend on what is seen as necessary and sustainable by responsible democratic governments and their trading communities.

This places special responsibilities on the institutional shoulders of the WCO. Guideline 49 that urges governments to join and support the WCO, should be seen and acted on in conjunction with Guideline 50 on Mutual Assistance.

The WCO offers the only international forum in which traders and carriers can meet, exchange views with, and hope to influence, Customs in over 160 nation states.

Given the now major effect and importance of security objectives and policies in border management, it is more than even necessary for accredited representatives of the world business community to have regular, frequent opportunities of consulting with and being informed by Customs, not just for security purposes, but setting security in its fullest practical context of the full range of Customs concerns and responsibilities.