Customs duties: Details of simplified procedures

The Finance Law 2024  has introduced a series of new provisions relating to customs measures. The Customs and Excise Administration has just published a circular summarizing the measures that come into force this year. These include Article 3 of the Finance Law, which amends the Customs Code.

This particularly concerns the facilitation and simplification of customs clearance procedures. In concrete terms, this involves the further dematerialization of customs procedures. Prior to these new provisions, goods destined for export from warehouses and customs clearance areas were routed to the customs offices of export, on the basis of a manual shipping document. From now on, this document will be digitized. Article 76 bis-3 of the Customs Code has also been revised to exempt simplified declarations covering the simple transport of goods from warehouses and customs clearance areas to export offices from the obligation to lodge an additional customs declaration.

Another new measure is the alignment of the regularization procedure for goods placed under warehousing arrangements with the procedure for other economic customs regimes. Article 140 of the Customs Code has been supplemented to include abandoning goods to the authorities or destroying them as alternative means of regularizing goods admitted under the warehousing procedure, as is the case for temporary admission and temporary admission for inward processing.  With regard to the holding of goods within the customs territory, Article 181 of the Customs Code has been supplemented in order to punish offences relating to the unjustified holding of goods subject to taxes, whether imported or produced locally.

With regard to article 275 of the Customs Code, the amendments introduced aim to make the settlement procedure more flexible in the case of contentious goods declared by confession and not seized, which represented serious difficulties in the recovery of duties and taxes due. The revision of Article 275 now allows duties and taxes to be assessed on goods actually seized. However, this does not apply to cases of fraud detected as part of the ex-post control and monitoring of special arrangements.

M.A.M.