Azerbaijan eyes expanding customs cooperation
By Aynur Karimova
Azerbaijan, which has recently turned into a coordination center for large-scale regional projects, eyes expanding multilateral cooperation in the customs field.
Major-General Igbal Babayev, the department head at the
Azerbaijani State Customs Committee, said the Committee plans to
sign agreements with Turkey and Kazakhstan in 2016 on exchange of
preliminary information on goods and vehicles moving across the
border.
“We have defined three priority lines as part of the strategy for
ensuring development of the information technologies in the customs
sphere. Improving the relations between the State Customs Committee
and customs services of other countries is among them,” he told
Trend.
Azerbaijan has already signed relevant agreements with Uzbekistan,
Georgia, Russia, Ukraine and Moldova on exchange of preliminary
information on goods and vehicles moving from other countries to
Azerbaijan and vice versa.
“Currently, we are working out a similar project with Turkey, Iran,
Kazakhstan and other CIS countries,” Babayev said.
Exchange of preliminary information speeds up the process of goods’
passage across the border and will enable to use risk management to
learn about the risks and minimize the risks of counterfeit goods
beforehand.
"Other two priority lines for developing the information
technologies in the customs field are the improvement of
“business-customs” and "customs-state” partnership," Babayev
stated, adding that the work is underway for totally switching to
full use of information technologies in the customs sphere.
Currently, around 95 percent of the customs bodies’ activity has
been transferred to the e-platform.
“Thus, we indicated 14 e-services on our website as part of “business-customs” partnership. Nine of these services are also available on the e-government portal,” he added.
After restoring its independence in 1991, Azerbaijan established the State Customs Committee in January 1992 under a presidential decree.
The Committee fulfilled the forecast of deductions by 100.1 percent in 2015, by transferring 1.592 billion manats ($1 billion) to the budget (a 81.1 million manats ($51.1 million) or 5.4 percent growth during a year). The income from the organizations financed from the state budget amounted to 222.6 million manats ($140 million) or by 7.4 percent or 15.3 million manats ($9.64 million) more than in 2014.
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Aynur Karimova is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Aynur_Karimova
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