World Customs Organization of the West and Central African region - Brazzaville hosts the 8th meeting of focal points of customs administrations in Brazzaville
25 Oct, 2017
From 25-27 October, 2017, the 20 or so participants in the 8th meeting of the focal points for capacity building and those responsible for reforming customs administrations in the West and Central African region of the World Customs Organization (WCO) will share their experience in customs reform and draw up new perspectives for the next Regional Strategic Plan 2018-2022.
The proceedings were opened by Emmanuel Akouala-Mpan, Principal private secretary of the Congolese Minister of finance and budget, and attended by the executive director of Customs and Indirect tax of the Congo, Jean Alfred Onanga and the representative of the deputy chairman of the WCO, Malan Assadou.
During the two previous rounds of reform for the periods 2009-2013 and 2013-2017 carried out in the region, important initiatives have been undertaken by the Regional Capacity Building Office (RCBO) to modernize customs administrations and to improve revenue collection security.
The 2013-2017 period, which is coming to its end, has been devoted to the organizational reform of customs administrations as a precondition for a major and more ambitious reform as part of the 2018-2022 Strategic Plan.
"In the light of the findings of self-assessment sessions which have been carried out for the period 2013-2017, it appears that some of these reforms have been very successful, while some of them have failed, sometimes for lack of realism or sound perspectives. It will be up to the participants to determine the causes of the failure during the proceedings," said Souleymane Sangaré, director of the RCBO.
"All these studies show that, in general, customs administrations still face challenges with regard to inadequate leadership, inefficient management of the administration, too much political influence in the daily management of human, budgetary and material resources; procedures that do not comply with facilitation standards, sporadic partnership with the private sector, limited ethics and deontology of customs officers," he said.
The initiatives proposed to administrations to take up these challenges in the next reform round should enable them to become modern and efficient administrations.
The executive director of Customs and Indirect tax, Jean Alfred Onanga, noted that the role and responsibility of the focal points in capacity building are crucial in this changing world, where the trend is the executives training, in order to enable the economies of the 182 WCO Member States to develop a common vision as regard tax and customs reforms.
According to him, tax collection is still at the core of customs activities. However, with the scheduled implementation of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) and the ambition of States to diversify their economies, customs should increasingly fulfil the three main tasks, namely: economically speaking, the task of directing investments towards priority sectors and producing statistics on foreign trade; the task of combating fraud, in order to secure the economies of States and the task of protecting public health and safety, particularly in the fight against drugs and drug trafficking.
Customs are thus called upon to undertake reform by sharing a common vision of the challenges ahead. The vision should be based on harmonization of procedures, collaboration between services, but also and above all on a common program of capacity building.
