Box 4.15
Fraud opportunities: misreporting cargo under traditional, manual reporting systems
At a land border traditional reporting is visual. A customs officer, seeing a vehicle entering the country, notes its registration number. This system lends itself to abuse unless properly audited. First, customs officials can be bribed not to enter a vehicle number in their log, or to enter the wrong number. Second, errors can be made in manually registering vehicles. Third, systems breakdowns—such as power failures (accidental or deliberate)—can prevent proper registration. Traditional auditing tools are also weak. In their original, manual form they were prone to errors and omission. Customs would manually re-enter in its logs the information in transit documents presented by drivers (assuming an international transit scheme was in operation). The border police would register every commercial vehicle, would sometimes copy the transit documents—about which they had little knowledge, leading to further misunderstanding and errors—and would make occasional reconciliations with customs log books. Down the road checks would then match the documentation presented by drivers with what had been recorded at the border. Improvements came when the International Road Transport Union (IRU) introduced the Safe TIR arrangement—matching TIR carnets (described in chapter 17) with regular discharge messages sent by customs headquarters to the IRU. Another improvement came when customs introduced inland road patrols, a second level of control independent from border customs authorities. At seaports problems with the traditional system are less acute. All incoming cargo has a trail of commercial or shipping documentation, which can be tallied against unloading records kept by customs. Similarly, rail transport companies proved reliable partners and had document trails that complemented customs records.
Immigration. Computerization is less widespread for immigration checks than for customs control. Rather than keying in all passport data at a control booth, passport scanning (for countries that issue machine readable passports) should be preferred as more reliable. Countries are increasingly testing new electronic gate solutions, such as iris identification (United Kingdom) and digitized fingerprints
(France). These systems rely on preregistering volunteers, and they may be out of reach for most travelers in many parts of the world. Other technologies, including face recognition (Australia’s Smartgate project) and biometric data on passports and identification cards, can accept more passengers without requiring preregistration.36 In any computer immigration system qualifying travelers should be offered a fast track procedure. Regular border station users, such as truck drivers and local taxi drivers licensed to cross the border, ought to be among the first beneficiaries of electronic identification. Technically, nothing prevents immigration authorities in one country from sharing data with colleagues on the other side. In the booths, data capture is independent from control so if immigration officers of two countries use a joint boot (box 4.16) they can capture data just once, followed by separate processing in national immigration databases. Wholly automatic control booths, using sophisticated iris and fingerprint scans, can even be programmed to send separate messages to the two countries’ systems and release a passenger only after receiving a positive response.
4 Borders, their design, and their operation
booths with a convenient interface between the national systems and the COMESA database. At present they have none.35 European Union procedures have made marked progress, with the integration of NCTS and ECS into national customs systems allowing nearly instant discharge of transit shipments. Another solution, easier to implement, is to connect customs systems across the border. Th is first step toward more elaborate regional integration is feasible, especially when both countries use ASYCUDA soft ware. Compatibility issues arising when two different versions are used (such as the ASYCUDA++ and ASYCUDA World versions) do not appear insurmountable. The connection can start with messages that a truck or consignment has been released for exit on one side, and it can gradually be extended to complete transit data sharing. Ultimately there can be automatic data input to the destination country’s declaration processing system.
Challenges in establishing data sharing arrangements. The main challenge is to convince agencies 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
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