Africa-Press – Eswatini. Eswatini Revenue Service (ERS) will launch the customs to business platform to enable border stakeholders to engage on day to day matters, according to ERS Commissioner General, Brightwell Nkambule.
Customs-Business engagement is a core element of good governance that helps to ensure legislation, regulations and policies are informed by a diversity of viewpoints and respond, to the greatest extent possible, to the needs identified
“This platform enables border stakeholders to engage on day to day matters,” he said.
Nkambule said ERS was committed to embarking on the digital transformation journey, hand in hand with ERS clients and ecosystem partners.
“We commit to consult our clients every step of this journey so that our clients have the opportunity to influence the way we work,” he said.
Nkambule further highlighted their flagship programme to enhance trade facilitation in the ASYCUDA WORLD upgrade.
ASYCUDA stands for Automated System for Customs Data. ASYCUDA has evolved over three generations, ASYCUDA World being the latest update.
The objectives of the project are trade facilitation and encouragement, trade costs reduction, customs revenue increase and improvement of trade statistics collection. “Our digital ambition is that our clients should no longer need to exit their ‘natural business systems’ to capture declarations,” he said.
Nkambule said instead, their systems would be interfaced to Customs so that declaration data could be drawn from the source system, improving the integrity of those declarations.
“With the ASYCUDA upgrade the systems related interruptions at the border shall be addressed,” he said.
He added that even with the current version of ASYCUDA, ERS had the functionality for pre-clearance. “That means traders have a platform to submit declarations and have them processed even before they get to the border. We call upon our clients to make use of these processes as they minimise the time spent at the border,” he said.
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