Customs goes digital

Pravin Gordhan (Image: GCIS)

"This is a very important milestone," Gordhan told media at Megawatt Park in Sunninghill, Johannesburg. "We will be one of the few countries in the world that has completely digitised customs processes," he said.

The new system centralises the clearing of all import and export declarations and uses a single processing engine. This helps to reduce red tape. The system came into effect on Saturday last week (17 August) after it ran concurrently with the old one for six months during a testing phase.

"This digitised customs process helps legal trade to happen and happen faster," Gordhan explained.

"There has been a huge reduction in time for those that are legitimate traders. What the system does is to make it [trade] fully electronic, get many middle people out of the way and allows businesses to get their goods quickly," he added.

Gordhan said that last year more than 4.3m containers worth R2.5trn moved across the country's borders, adding that SARS customs officials used about 16m pieces of paper to process 5.5m declarations received during the period.

"The customs management system now eliminates virtually 99% if not all of that paper," he said.

Gordhan said the new system would improve competitiveness and reduce crime by detecting illicit goods more efficiently. It had better security and risk detection elements meaning that people "can't play around with the numbers".

Gordhan would not comment on the exact cost of the system.

Source: Sapa via I-Net Bridge