TIACA welcomes WCO’s paperless airfreight efforts

The WCO’s key Permanent Technical Committee has not only accepted the facilitation case for reform but will also bring its own extensive professional skills to a phased long-term task of comprehensive revision and reform.

The official report of the WCO meeting records that it approved proposals to:

• Undertake a survey within the WCO member administrations and partner organisations to list the top priority documents to be dematerialised

• Discuss measures to promote digital signatures as a means to maintain authenticity and integrity of documents

• Initiate discussions on the end-to-end management of electronic documents with other international organisations/assemblies e.g. CITES Convention, Trade and Transport federations etc.

• Work on a WCO Recommendation based on the proposed Guidelines on Supporting Documents

TIACA secretary general Daniel Fernandez said that the WCO’s commitment is a constructive response to a long-standing and substantial business difficulty.

"We work in a world where international air consignments, managed by global traders through fine-tuned automated business technologies and moving on modern aircraft controlled and tracked by state of the art communications systems are still subject to completely anachronistic paper-based checks on millions of import transactions annually," said Fernandez.

He added that French Customs recently identified and listed some 45 different documents that may need to be carried with the goods and made available for inspection if demanded by Customs or other official agencies. While the number of such documents required in any individual transaction will vary, the overall volume for regular carriers is still very substantial. One global express operator has calculated that two all-cargo 747s would be needed to move all such paper demanded every year of his own company.

"The overall cost is not just funding this unnecessary carbon footprint but the extra and incalculable cumulative cost of all the delays inherent in preparing, presenting and processing these pieces of paper in a predominantly electronic business and administrative environment," said Fernandez.

TIACA has been highlighting this costly anomaly for many years, and has made its abolition a major facilitation objective. It has called on governments and relevant international institutions to eliminate all but the most essential documents, and turn the remainder into internationally standard electronic messages.

Fernandez said that this process will take some time, but the WCO’s acceptance of the need for reform is extremely welcome and can be supported by the increased paperless trading and automation solutions being implemented by the air cargo industry through initiatives such as IATA e-freight and Cargo 2000."

He pointed out that while the WCO cannot take up and rationalise the paper-based procedures of other such agencies as food, veterinary or environmental authorities, they can launch a powerful initiative to deal with their own surviving documentary requirements and can exercise invaluable influence with other controllers at and through regular Co-operative Border Management conferences and with the ready-made advantage that the WCO Data Model already provides world standard data descriptions for the information items in all current "supporting documents.