In a move designed to “ease doing business in Guyana”, the National Assembly on Wednesday passed legislation providing for a simplified process for importing and exporting.
The Customs and Trade Single Window System Bill 2019 establishes the Customs and Trade Single Window System (SWS) which will be the single decision-making facility for customs inspection, clearance, and release of cargo, enabling electronically, a single submission of data and information, and a single and synchronous processing of data and information.
“The Single Window System shall serve as a single entry point for parties involved in trade and transport to lodge documents electronically, for processing and approval; and make payments electronically for fees, levies, duties and taxes due to the Government, on goods which are imported or exported,” the explanatory memorandum of the bill states.
The legislation, which was passed in the absence of opposition PPP/C parliamentarians who are boycotting sittings of the Assembly, will become law when it is signed by President David Granger.
“This bill is simple and it is necessary and needed to drive this process forward. Together, hopefully, in time we can have this single window become reality and hence improve doing business in Guyana,” Minister of Finance Winston Jordan, who piloted the bill through its passage, said.
The Finance Minister lamented that “currently, information is submitted and processed numerous times to customs and different government entities…these procedures and cost of compliance impede facilitation of international trade and are time-consuming.”
With the new legislation, he said, persons would now go only to the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA), which is responsible for the management and implementation of the SWS.
Among the provisions of the bill are for registration of users of the system. “Any person intending to engage in the import and export of goods shall apply to the Revenue Authority for registration as a user of the Single Window System,” it says.
The GRA also has to put measures in place to enable payments and is also mandated to put in place a suitable gateway model for purposes of inter-linking with regional and other international SWS.
Jordan had also explained that government procured a change of software in the Automated System for Customs Data (ASYCUDA) for the GRA and that system is already being rolled out.
Commissioner General of the GRA, Godfrey Statia, who was present at Wednesday’s sitting, had defended the agency’s choice of the ASYCUDA saying it leads to not only overall faster processing times as compared to the previous Total Revenue Integrated Processing System (TRIPS) software but is hard to penetrate.
“The previous system (TRIPS), allowed importers to prepare and submit declarations weeks in advance which gave the importers sufficient time to lodge, process, answer queries and pay taxes for declarations weeks in advance before arrival of the goods. The AW [ASYCUDA World] system does not allow importers to lodge declarations unless the Manifest is registered and the Waybills are validated, and that the electronic submission is only made a few days before the arrival of the cargo and after payment, the various lanes assignments would be applied,” he had said.
“The submission of the electronic manifest through ASYCUDA now allows for the GRA to conduct profiling before arrival of the vessel and most of the documents are processed and containers released without much Customs intervention. Further, officers will be properly monitored through the system and they were instructed to process declarations without delay, since our Post Clearance Audit Unit is well trained to detect infractions after goods have been released,” he had said.
Meanwhile, the Customs (Amendment of Schedules) Bill, that Jordan referred to as the “Bible” of the GRA, was also passed.
That piece of legislation will replace all the schedules to the Customs Act, Chapter 82:01, to update them to reflect the current Harmonized Commodity Description Coding System referred to as the HS. It utilises the 2017 version of the HS, which will ensure that Guyana is compliant with international trade obligations and will ensure consistent laws to facilitate trade and protect Guyana’s revenues.
