SAGE slams “archaic” control of international trade

The whole system is costly, inefficient and unnecessarily bureaucratic, and needs to be fundamentally changed. Traders who can be trusted should be given the right to control their own trade compliance, says SAGE – a group of representatives from private, internationally trading companies and public stakeholders in the UK.

SAGE chairman Mark Corby said: "There is a growing number of trade compliance and facilitation managers from companies engaged in large scale international trade who are frustrated by the increasing costs and complexity of trade compliance requirements. The nature of our businesses and the world trading environment requires a totally new approach. That’s what our group is all about – opening up the debate to some radical new thinking that fundamentally changes the way we look at controlling international trade."

The group believes it has hit on the solution: self regulation by those that can demonstrate rigorous monitoring, policing and control management systems; combined with an emphasis on control data being sourced and accessible further upstream in the supply chain, before the goods are even loaded for export.

"The days of defining freight as either an import or an export are numberedm" said Corby. "An import should merely be seen as the end result of a prior export. We should instead be thinking more in terms of the start and end of a supply chain, and recognising that all the data about the freight and the parties involved in the supply chain is available somewhere in the system before anything gets shipped. If we can work out how to capture it, present it in the right format and provide the means of giving timely and authorised access to the different information and data on the freight, we might one day be able to completely discard all import and export declarations altogether."

He said that there are a lot of related issues that need to be addressed: simplifying VAT; pushing ahead with centralised clearance; incorporating trade compliance terms and conditions into contracts; and simplifying the harmonised classification system of goods.

However, he said that the Group needs to engage with government authorities and industry alike to change their mindset in order to move them away from the notion that international trade needs to be controlled like it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

"Traders must gain the trust of authorities that they have the processes, the measures, the systems and rigorous auditing processes by independent and government authorised inspectors.  These inspectors should not only know about trade compliance but understand business and commercial processes too. The financial gains from such an approach would be massive for many companies and governments too that are already struggling to resource the control of international trade and the increased demands placed on them in the fight against organised crime and terrorism."