Improving Customs Transit Systems

In the Islamic Countries

In 2017, the NCTS managed 11.2 million transit movements or 44,412 movements released per

business day (+7% compared to 2016).

This growth is attributed mainly to the increase in the number of movements that were

observed after Serbia, Turkey and North Macedonia acceded to the Common Transit Convention

and joined the NCTS procedures (respectively 213%, 30%, and 120%). The improvement in the

quality of operations is evidenced by the decrease in the average error rate in 2017 (0.10%

compared to 0.17% in 2016) without any major business impact.

The CCN applications exchanged 4.79 billion messages marking an increase of 5.45% over 2016

when 4.54 billion messages were exchanged

2.2.4

Success factors and best practices

In today's world, CAs has to adapt to the needs of trade with speed and flexibility and keep

abreast of the continual changes in the business environment. CTR has an important role in the

supply chain to lower the costs and time for transit, but just being an IT system is not enough.

Several success factors for achieving an effective CTR require long-term transformation, from

legal, procedural, IT, border management, aspects have been identified by this and previous

studies.

2.2.4.1

General success factors

There is not one single or one-size-fits-all factor that Customs could follow and adapt for

successful CTR. The ASEAN ACTS and Central America TIM regional transit systems have

identified EU NCTS as a model for successful CTR. The ACTS, TIM, and NCTS best practices are:



Speed up the procedures applied at all Customs offices involved in transit operations,

i.e., at the Customs office of Departure, the Customs Office of Guarantee, the Customs

office of Transit or Customs Office

en route

and finally at the Customs Office of

Destination;



Connected with the control of single transit customs declaration, the adequacy, and

quality of guarantee, enclosed documents, and goods and with release or end of transit

procedure;



Eliminate barriers between customs brokers and Customs authorities which can occur

at the Customs office concerned and which can be linked with a type and data in the

Customs Declaration, a type of representation of a declarant, a guarantee to secure all

the possible duties, taxes and charges and the documents enclosed to Customs

Declaration;



Reduce carriers’ expenses resulting from delays, and repeated inspection of the cargo at

each national frontier;