Korea Customs Service focuses on customs clearance for Korean exporters
By Roh Suk-hwan
Korea relies heavily on foreign trade. However, due to growing trade protectionism around the world and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, more and more countries are shutting down their borders and restricting goods and people's movements. This devastating trend has highly affected Korea's trade environment, causing Korean traders to experience various customs clearance procedures abroad.
Customs clearance issues hamper the domestic trading industry's growth, causing an increase in logistics cost and disturbing the supply chain. What's more concerning is that the issues are frequently reported from countries included in the government's iconic New Southern and Northern policies. To deal with the current challenges, trading companies are urged to take advantage of the measures provided by the Korea Customs Service to overcome customs clearance issues.
During the initial stage of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, Korean exporters could not grasp information on customs authorities in their partner country or how the air and seaports were operating. They panicked because they could not access information that could be easily acquired in a normal situation.
To prevent the disease from spreading, countries worldwide have shortened business hours at customs offices or reduced the number of customs officers, and shut down their airports or restricted air travel to stop the virus inflow. Consequently, this has caused severe problems for the trading industry, as exporters needed to ship out commodities to their factories in overseas countries or receive parts from them.
These issues were raised in China at first. To promptly figure out the circumstances and get up-to-date information of the largest trading partner of Korea, the Korea Customs Service retrieved information on emergency working hours of customs offices, logistics states, and major air/seaports' operation through its customs attache to China, to publish on its website for the businesses. Companies who needed to use customs services or ship their products in an emergency could use the information and give positive feedback to customs officers, confirming that the data helped them run their businesses continuously and schedule their shipments. Later, when the COVID-19 outbreak was announced as a pandemic, the Korea Customs Service expanded the range of its daily reports to the 13 regions in eight countries where its customs attaches are deployed.
Meanwhile, businesses exporting their products to India have shown growing concerns about that country's strengthened origin verification procedure. In response, the Korea Customs Service is striving to support Korean exporters to minimize their customs clearance difficulties in many ways, including by sending an official letter from the commissioner. Prior to the scheme's launch, the customs attache dispatched to India organized a webinar for Korean businesses to help them make the necessary preparations in advance and arranged a video conference with India Customs to facilitate the transition.
On Nov. 11, the Korean customs attaches stationed in eight countries worldwide hosted an on-line briefing session on overseas customs clearance regimes for Korean exporters. Amid the COVID-19 outbreak, it was challenging to organize a public event, so the session was arranged online to include more participants and provide essential information on customs clearance procedures in foreign countries without spatial limitations.
Korean customs attaches assigned to significant export areas, such as the United States, EU, China and India made presentations on changes in customs procedures amid the COVID-19 crisis in their respective regions and gave guidelines to help businesses maximize the use of clearance information and up-to-date trends provided by customs. About 700 companies in the export and logistics sector have shown a high interest in these presentations.
During the briefing session, on-line one-on-one consulting sessions from the customs attaches were also provided. Participants were able to get useful advice on exporting particular products to the country of their interest. In the consulting sessions, the customs attaches promised to keep providing various information to facilitate the customs clearance procedure for Korean exporters. Simultaneously, participating companies asked the Korea Customs Service to arrange more events similar to this session to have more chances to get answers to their questions and receive expert advice related to customs clearance in other countries.
To meet the industries' expectations, the Korea Customs Service plans to continue formulating policies addressing Korean exporters' customs clearance issues. The Mutual Recognition Arrangement of Authorized Economic Operators concluded with another country guarantees the customs clearance benefits given to domestic businesses with high law-compliance records to the partner country's companies reciprocally.
As the arrangements have been signed with 22 countries worldwide, Korean exporters have been able to get streamlined customs clearance. Therefore the Korea Customs Service will be ratcheting up efforts to sign more Mutual Recognition Agreements of Authorized Economic Operators with other countries, especially with emerging export destinations such as Vietnam and Russia.
In line with this, the Korea Customs Service will deploy its customs experts to countries with frequent issues to bolster customs-to-customs partnerships and minimize the possible difficulties in clearance. When an exporter experiences any customs related problem overseas, it is strongly advised to use the Korea Customs Service's export support measures by contacting the Korean customs attache deployed in the country concerned.
Roh Suk-hwan is commissioner of Korea Customs Service.