TradeLane

Thailand is well known as a beautiful country filled with friendly people - the ‘Land of Smiles’. Given this well-deserved reputation, it may come as a surprise that Thailand is also well known in Asia trade compliance circles for very tough customs authorities.

To celebrate the opening of Tradewin Thailand, we wanted to highlight the top 3 reasons for import clearance delays.

Last year the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement had a few hurdles you may have heard about. However, it has been brought back to life with a few tweaks and fewer tweets.

So here it is…

The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP or TPP11) was signed on the 8^th of March 2018 in Santiago and brings together 11 countries: Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, New Zealand, Singapore, and Vietnam.

Being the first Goods Compliance Update after the conclusion of the 2016-17 financial year, there is so much information to sift through, so for this post, I have decided just to focus on some critical themes that are watch areas for the financial year 2017-18. I have chosen these areas in particular as the statistics and information are quite alarming, and therefore indicate an increased compliance focus by the Australian Border Force (“ABF”).

Time has certainly flown since I last posted about the first Goods Compliance Update for 2017 and here we are looking at the second Update from Australian Border Force (ABF) for the year. Here is a brief summary of the relevant points importers and exporters should be aware of:

The Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP) in Australia recently published DIBPN 2016/35, Voluntary Disclosures under Section 243T and Section 243U Customs Act 1901. In this notice, DIBP highlighted their commitment to working with industry to encourage higher levels of voluntary compliance by providing increased transparency to the regulatory trade environment.

A voluntary disclosure is the communication of a written notice of an error, omission or adjustment in statements made to DIBP. If you make such disclosures voluntarily, before DIBP instigates any queries or proceedings, you will likely be protected from penalties that would otherwise be imposed.