Approach to New Customs Authorisation Applications: By what method can improvements to the UCC authorisation application process be developed and evaluated and what role therein could Dutch Customs have?

According to the informa on published on the website of the European Commission Taxa on and Customs Union (Customs Are Business Friendly, n.d.), in 2021, 67,4% of imports involved a simplification procedure, entry in the declarant’s records was used in connection to simplifications in 51,5% of cases in which goods entering the European Union (herea er EU) were placed under a customs procedure, and the simplification rate with regard to transit was 62,2%. These are just a few numbers concerning EU customs facilitation which show how widely used and how important customs simplifications are. To be able to use simplified procedures, various Union Customs Code, herea er UCC, (Regulation (EU) No 9522013 of the European Parlia.Pdf, n.d.) authorisations are necessary, which can only be obtained if a prospective authorisation holder applies for them in one of the EU Member States. Those authorisations, excluding Authorised Economic Operator (herea er AEO) authorisations, are applied for, and processed in an EU wide system called Customs Decision Management System (hereafter CDMS). Each EU Member State follows their own CDMS implementation schedule; in the Netherlands most of the UCC (not AEO) authorisations had to be applied for in CDMS as of the 1st of January 2021, although for some authorisations it only became mandatory later in 2021.

According to the CDMS data concerning the period between the 1st of January 2021 and the 1st of September 2022, only 37% of the UCC (not AEO) authorisation applications filed in the Netherlands led to an authorisation being issued, and 63% of those applications led to other, unfavourable, outcomes: 8% of the applications were not accepted, 50% were withdrawn (either before or after acceptance) and 5% were refused. It also transpired that many applicants requested an extension of the decision time-limit set out for application processing by the UCC (Regula on (EU) No 9522013 of the European Parlia.Pdf, n.d.). It was not clear why as many as 63% of the UCC (not AEO) authorisation applications did not lead to an authorisation being issued and why decision time-limit extensions were necessary after applications were accepted. It was also not clear what could be done to limit the number of applications with unfavourable outcomes and the number of applications needing a decision time-limit extension. That is why this research was focused on the way in which improvements to the UCC (not AEO) authorisation application process could be developed and evaluated, and the role of Dutch Customs therein. The research objectives included identifying the main reasons of the unfavourable application outcomes and extension requests, defining a possible solution and Dutch Customs’ role therein, and identifying how the improvements could be measured.