In a letter dated 18 August 2011 Sars released a letter titled ”Go-live of Release 2 at KSIA, Richards Bay, Port Elizabeth, PEIA, East London and CTIA”. It’s all systems go for the implementation of Customs Modernisation Release 2 at King Shaka International Airport, Richards Bay, Port Elizabeth, Port Elizabeth International Airport, Cape Town International Airport and East London this weekend. We would like to draw your attention to the following: All declarations for the above three offices should be submitted by 16:00 tomorrow (Friday 19 August) as far as possible, especially relating to emergency products. This also applies to OR Tambo International Airport (ORTIA) and other Service Manager-enabled Customs offices (Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg), due to a major system rollout taking place in SARS on Friday 19 Aug and Saturday 20 Aug 2011. In the case of ORTIA, all declarations that are submitted after Friday night and do not receive a result message within one hour, must be manually taken to the branch front-end on Saturday or Sunday morning if entry is urgent or of high priority: (i) All declarations that are submitted over the weekend and not flagged for further inspection by Customs will be released as before. Only declarations that are queried will receive no CUSRES message until the system comes back online; (ii) If the supporting documents are brought into the ORTIA office for manual processing and such cases are released on Saturday or Sunday through the manual release (DA74) process, please do not respond to any EDI requests thereafter relating to the applicable case (Customs will upload the supporting documents manually when the system comes back online again); and (iii) In the event of SARS systems being offline, supporting documents cannot be scanned and submitted via e@syScan. Clients must therefore: (i) please bring the documents manually and include the SAD500 or other declaration documents; and (ii) use the LRN number for clear identification on the CAPE/Export System. ORTIA staff will be operating in manual mode throughout Saturday and Sunday. We therefore recommend to traders that all high-volume trade be processed on Friday. Since the abovementioned six offices going live over the weekend do not operate over a weekend, traders will only be impacted by the Release 2 rollout from Monday morning. Release 2 operational features include: o In the near future paper supporting documents will no longer be accepted at these offices.., It will soon become compulsory for traders to submit all supporting documents electronically. Traders are advised to make use of free software provided by service providers, called e@syScan, which will enable them to submit documents speedily from the comfort of their home or office computer. • Traders will also be able to bring supporting documents to either of the following centres: • The Doringkloof bulk scanning facility (7 Protea Street, Block C, Doringkloof) • The bulk scanning facility in Alberton (New Redruth campus, McKinnon Crescent) • The Durban SARS Taxpayer Service office (201 Dr Pixlie Ka Seme Street, Durban) • The Cape Town bulk scanning facility at the back of the current Customs Client Interface office (Ground Floor - P166 building, on the corner of Lower Long and Jetty streets). Please remember: You should only submit supporting documents for the above offices when requested to do so by a system-generated notification or when the declaration is Page 2 of 2 manually submitted through the Service Desk or Pigeon Hole notification. No supporting documents can be submitted without a case number. • New Customs Status Codes, currently applied at ORTIA, Johannesburg (Alberton), Durban and Cape Town, will become applicable in the case of these six offices. • The DA74 form will be replaced with system-generated release notifications Clients are also urged to check with their Bureaus/service providers that their software is up-to-date. If there are any issues during go-live, please contact your Bureaus first to check whether the problem lies on their side. However, if there are any operational issues that need to be dealt with urgently, we have made available on the Customs Modernisation website (http://www.sars.gov.za/home.asp?pid=60547) a specific escalation process to be followed in each of the three branches during and after the implementation period. And finally, please make use of the above website if you need any information on Customs Modernisation as all relevant letters, guides, charts and other documents can be found here.
