Betting on paperless customs

Betting on paperless customs

Imported cars at the Customs Department, which aims to ease doing business by launching paperless customs clearance.
Imported cars at the Customs Department, which aims to ease doing business by launching paperless customs clearance.

The Customs Department hopes that Thailand will rise in the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business rankings after the launch of Pre-Arrival Processing (PAP) e-bill payment and e-customs clearance.

PAP has been widely adopted in most customs ports, with the percentage of pre-arrival manifests for both sea and air cargo reaching 99% of the total manifest at the end of 2018, said Krisada Chinavicharana, director-general of the Customs Department.

With PAP, exporters are allowed to submit advanced electronic manifests ahead of cargo arrivals, while importers can submit import declarations and pay taxes and duties in advance.

PAP shortens cargo clearance duration by 2-6 hours for air freight and from 37 hours to 31 hours for sea freight.

Thailand's ranking among 190 economies in the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business (EODB) Report 2019 fell a notch to 27th, though the overall score rose by 1.06 points to 78.45. Thailand's EODB score, an absolute measure of the country's progress towards global best practices, increased from 77.39 the previous year.

The government has worked to address barriers to doing business to improve the country's ranking, adding business-friendly regulations and efforts to attract foreign investment.

Mr Krisada said e-bill payment, which was unveiled last month, lets exporters, importers and shippers pay all customs-related bills via internet banking, mobile banking, ATM, bank branch or counter service.

Time used to contact customs has been shortened to three hours, and the cost associated with customs is 433 baht less per transaction.

Under the paperless declaration scheme for e-customs clearance, paper declarations are no longer required for Laem Chabang port and the Port Authority of Thailand.

Some 60 million copies of paper declarations a year are expected to be reduced, saving 30 million baht in costs.

The department is focused on customs-related measures to reduce time and cost for imports and exports and ease doing business, Mr Krisada said.

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