Facilitating Trade:
Improving Customs Risk Management Systems
In the OIC Member States
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 The general experience that the improved efficiency in customs and agencies - together
with the traders´ incentive to achieve faster release - brings about better compliance on
the traders’ part. This has a further positive impact on the correctness of foreign trade
statistics;
 Based on its integrated risk assessment service, the ICRM will greatly facilitate and, in
fact, automate the decision-making procedures. The risk for each case will be estimated
with precision, and the decision will be dependent on this risk. This way the exercise of
discretionary powers by customs officers and agencies will be minimized;
 The improved efficiency in the customs control may lead to an increase in revenue
collection by the customs of the participating countries since the outcome of the risk
assessment will be more reliable and will point to consignments with the highest risk;
 The time taken to clear goods through customs using old-fashioned procedures can
amount to as much as one or two weeks. The ICRM could dramatically reduce the release
time of the goods – and thus reduce the transaction costs of the traders significantly;
 Significant volumes stored in a common data layer, transferred and processed
information, as well as centralized, common information management, are the typical
characteristics of integrated systems;
 Many customs authorities in the OIC MS are using (proprietary) risk assessment
methods and tools. The ICRM will enhance such methods based on advanced data
mining techniques, consolidating data from any possible source and applying “state-of-
the-art” pattern recognition techniques;
 Although BPR (Business Process Re-engineering) is not an objective of the ICRM,
positive impact can be expected especially in the identification of additional
functionalities that will enrich the CRM;
 Information/data that should ideally be used to achieve optimal results from the risk
analysis. The identification of additional information and the need to obtain them and
utilize them in the CRM process may stress the need and eventually lead to process
improvement;
 The expectation from the implementation of ICRM is to influence the working
environment for the customs officers through the modernization of the risk assessment
framework and the effective decision support processes. Correct, timely and accurate
decisions can be based on an automated way to evaluate the risk and take specific
measures.
Important aspects of the ICRM are the interoperability and interconnectivity. Interoperability
should define the mapping of business processes and data sets that will allow the adequate
exchange of required information for ICRM. Interconnectivity is a communication layer, which
allows the exchange of various types of information between different types of platforms and
databases.