FACILITATING INTRA-OIC TRADE:
Improving the Efficiency of the Customs Procedures in the OIC Member States
56
institutions to give utmost importance to the administration of human resources.
According to Wulf (2005), managing human resources at customs can be broken down
into several phases:
• defining the desired staff profile
• establishing a recruitment process that ensures that customs has the desired staff on
board
• training incumbent staff to maintain skill levels
• ensuring that the compensation package enables customs to motivate and retain staff
• ensuring that poor performance and integrity failures are promptly sanctioned.
However, most of the reforming customs administrations focus on training and unable
to adopt a comprehensive strategy or change the existing regulations on human
resources development.
Customs Administrations shall include training in its business plan whether it adopts a
modern human resources strategy or not. Standards are increasing in customs
procedures in each and every year and the staff needs to be trained for conducting their
work in an efficient manner. For some of the new tasks, such as ICT, training the
existing staff will be inadequate. Employing new skilled human resources will be more
adequate.
-Financing
Implementation of the customs modernization reforms requires financing. Introducing
the new techniques, administrational reforms, use of modern equipment etc. require
financing not only for their inception but also for their operation. IFC (2007) suggests
that there are three cost areas of the customs reform programs. These are i) Consulting
Fees for Technical Assistance, ii) Institutional costs and iii) Training costs. However,
these costs do not include the customs infrastructures. The customs posts of many
developing countries and the LDCs have very poor facilities at the customs stations.
Therefore, upgrading these facilities also require available financial resources.
Securing the financial cost of implementing the reform programs is a common concern
for many countries. Recently, Moise (2013) investigated the cost of trade facilitation
measures in nine developing countries and LDC’s (Burkina Faso, Colombia, Costa
Rica, the Dominican Republic, Kenya, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Mongolia and Sierra
Leone) and provided quantitative data on financial costs of implementing the measures
in these countries. The study concludes that financial costs of implementing trade
facilitation measures (both inception and operational costs) are not high except costs
related to information technologies especially introducing single window mechanisms.
Table 9 below illustrates the inception and operations cost of selected customs
modernization measures in selected countries found by Moise (2013). The results also