Improving Customs Transit Systems
In the Islamic Countries
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A Centrally Developed Transit Application (CDTA) suite has been developed to support NCTS. It
consists of six applications, which are partially destined for national purposes of Member States,
but partially are the central DG TAXUD applications:
 Minimal Common Core (MCC) – application supporting the core transit business;
 GMS – Guarantee Management System;
 Transit Test Application (TTA) – Member States test application;
 Standard Transit Test Application (STTA) – EU test application;
 CS/RD – a repository of centralized data and global NCTS parameters;
 Central Services/Management Information System (CS/MIS);
 Statistics Management Analysis Reporting Tool (SMART) – a statistical reporting tool
application.
MCC and GMS applications (sunset 2008, not further supported by DG TAXUD since July 2010)
can either be adopted by the Member States as the basis for their own NCTS development or be
replaced by specific solutions, under the assumption that they do conform to all EU
specifications.
From a functional point of view, the NCTS encloses several transit process threads
corresponding to the various activities which are performed in the NCTS:
 Core business, dealing with the main Transit activities performed at Office of Departure,
Office of Transit, Office of Destination and/or at Trader’s premises;
 Guaranteemanagement, covering the activities related to guarantee, wherever they take
place;
 Risk management, performing the estimation of the risk present in every transit
operation and producing relevant directives;
 Central services, including the management of reference databases and the provision of
common services to the various NCTS users;
 System administration, providing services needed to administer an IT system such as
the NCTS.
Unless human intervention is specifically required by national policy, NCTS allows fully
automated processing of:
 Departure operations (from declaration reception to departure of the movement);
 Arrival operations (from presentation to release of the goods);
 Write-off operations which close transit movements.
The transit movement is initiated by the Trader’s transit declaration. Thereafter, the Trader
receives the NCTS Accompanying Document, identified by a Movement Reference Number
(MRN), and the vehicle with the consignment covered by this document goes to the first Office