technical support for revenue collection and control. These are: • A human resource management unit, focusing on personnel recruitment and selection and the preparation and delivery of urgently needed trainings. • A technical support unit responsible for the development of customs control and clearance procedures, valuation procedures, tariffs and nomenclature, the control of origin procedures, exemption control, and transit procedures. • An ICT support unit. • An internal control unit. Depending on the available resources and the expected workload, these functions can be grouped initially in just one or two units—to be further split up later, when work volume and available resources permit. At the regional office level. Depending on the size, geography, and trading activity of a country, a regional governance level may be needed. The initial structure of regional offices should be limited to the most essential support and monitoring functions, similar to what was noted in the previous paragraph for headquarters. The most essential operational support units will concentrate on valuation, classification, origin, internal control, training, and ICT.
Staffing and training
Staffi ng border agencies in fragile states is a most challenging task—and one that will determine whether progress ultimately is made. A key step in
B O R D E R M A N A G E M E N T M O D E R N I Z AT I O N
19 Border management considerations in fragile states
At the local office level. This is where all control and declaration processing functions take place to ensure revenue collection and the processing of incoming and outgoing goods flows. Organizational arrangements are needed here for: • Cargo manifest control and writeoff. • Declaration reception and validation. • Declaration checking, including the important duty assessment activities (particularly value, classification, and origin checking). • The physical inspection of imports. • The collection of duties and taxes. • The prevention of smuggling and the securing of goods until they are released from customs control.
providing for staffing and training is to make a systematic comparison between the staffing requirements (level and qualifications) for a simple customs operation—given the present circumstances of the country—and the staff engaged by customs before the country became a fragile state. Some countries undertaking customs reform have chosen to pursue radical staff renewal, either by introducing an autonomous revenue agency (ARA; examples are Bolivia, Ghana, and Uganda) or by recruiting a management fi rm to temporarily assume many customs functions while preparing local staff to take over in due course (examples are Mozambique, Angola, and more recently the Democratic Republic of Congo). Such efforts are time consuming and extremely delicate—as well as costly—but they do have the advantage of being able to draw on the strong elements of the old staff and bring in new blood over time. In circumstances of high unemployment this permits customs to be very selective and recruit good staff. The process can, however, be very contentious—at times it will be impossible to remove the existing staff—and yet it must obtain both internal and external legitimacy. Such a radical program needs to be grounded in a thorough understanding of the forces at play in the country. Whatever method is chosen to select the staff for border control activities, much will be gained from providing them with appropriate training. For immediate needs, urgent basic skills training should be organized for available personnel so that the new or reformed customs systems and procedures can be implemented without delay. These courses should instill the basic skills and attitudes of a civil servant, such as service orientation and integrity, and they should provide a basic understanding of the new customs system (concentrating on the most essential controls and procedures). More extensive training will need to be provided as soon as it can be organized. Therefore, the development of a comprehensive training system should begin early on. Obviously the duration and curriculum will depend on the severity of initial staffi ng constraints. Newcomers normally should undergo full time induction training. A part time arrangement, such as half a day of work and half a day of instruction, may work well, as it allows a larger number of staff to be trained early. Technical 323