Whoever decides to leave for a touristic trip, a business trip, or sends international shipments, will be involved with customs. This is a public entity in charge of controlling goods entering or exiting a national territory. Quality and safety are first priorities.
Exportation is a type of system, a procedure promoted by various governments to encourage trade. This operation is connected with tax and customs laws that must be respected meticulously. Basically, exportation is a transfer outside the EU in which commercial goods are sent abroad.
The goods entering customs are subject to strict controls and if they are not suitable, they are seized by the customs authorities. This problem may be resolved by requesting the launch of customs clearance proceedings. This consists of payment of customs duties, thus releasing the goods, allowing them to be exported. The owner of the goods or a representative having a customs declaration for exportation may request customs clearance. This documentation is transmitted electronically to the various customs systems where the imported goods must arrive. The analysis of the fiscal and general security risk that may be incurred takes place in those offices. After the due inspections have been carried out, the goods are ready to be exported.
The goods must be provided with the appropriate exportation declaration; the customs office will also be responsible for the entire procedure. Following this, the community system will place the customs office where the goods will be exported in contact with the goods import office. There are various customs assistance centres working for third parties such as small companies and merchants: these are proposed as references for handling customs procedures securely. Briefly, these agencies have obtained the full trust of the customs entities, being able to present diverse goods directly to the offices, avoiding sustaining the costs of a customs inspection.
The goods, if not considered suitable for exportation, are sent to the customs warehouse: this is a place where assets are temporarily deposited and stored. This operation does not require payment of import duties. During goods storage procedure, immediate payment of customs fees is not required, but is suspended. The customs entity has the right to seize the goods and ban their exportation.
The exporter of commercial goods, furthermore, must give these a customs destination; if there is no possibility of releasing the goods or returning them to the sender, they may opt for exportation under the control of customs and this latter may expropriate the goods of its value and eliminate the customs fees provided following inspection of the goods.
The work of the customs entity is complex and dangerous; this prioritizes security to guarantee public order within the national community. There are various systems to reconcile and organize the customs fees, which are the most important part of the customs office’s work. The final importation system consists of payment of customs fees and thus releasing the goods, which comes from countries outside the community, from any obstacle of customs or fiscal nature.
In the transit system, the shipper agrees to present the goods again, inspected by the customs office of origin, to the customs office on arrival, within a pre-established period of time. This system is applied to goods that are subject to customs formalities when moving from one place to another.
The customs storage system allows warehousing goods not belonging to the community territory, in order for them not to be subject to customs duties on importation. The passive perfection system, instead, supports the competitiveness of the companies belonging to the community: it is possible to export commercial goods temporarily and submit them to modification and perfecting operations. At this time, the active perfection allows exporting the goods and re-exporting them later as finished products. All this without incurring customs duties.
Similarly, the system for transformation under customs control allows modifying non-EU goods in European territory without incurring customs fees. Finally, we have temporary admission, a system that allows introducing foreign goods into the EU on the occasion of trade fairs or other occasional events, to later export them again.