Many importers would agree that the most frustrating part of importing goods is having to deal with customs when a consignment is queried, detained or stopped for an inspection.
From the outset, it must be emphasized that most interventions are dealt with relatively quickly with little or no inconvenience.
There are, however, exceptions and it is the exceptions that attract the most attention, as they inevitably lead to delays in obtaining release of the goods resulting in additional costs to the importer.
Again, a distinction must be made between consignments where a contravention has been detected and those consignments delayed due to customs inefficiencies and where the trader is compliant.
The Customs & Excise Act, the Rules to the Act, various policy guidelines and the Service Charter all contain references to timeframes within which traders must comply as well as the timeframes within which customs must respond and finalize matters.
It is when a trader is compliant, but customs fails to respond within a reasonable time, or in some cases not at all, that serious challenges arise.
Customs has always had escalation processes in place to assist traders when experiencing delays and, in the past, escalations were directed to specific teams such as documentary inspections, physical inspections or audit teams, and to the specific branch office.
These escalation processes have been amended over the years, most recently with the introduction of the modality structures.
Traders are now required to follow specific and strict escalation processes such as the Air Modality-Doringkloof case query process, the Land Modality query and escalation protocol, the Sea Modality query and escalation protocol Durban compliance centre, the Sea Modality query and escalation protocol Cape Town compliance centre, and the Sea Modality query and escalation protocol port specific frontline operations.
There are also escalation processes in place for refunds, appeals and Tariff Determinations if not responded to or finalized within reasonable timeframes.
For each of the above, there are levels of escalation to follow with senior customs management only becoming involved further down the process, the first escalation being via a group mailbox.
There is, however, a fundamental flaw in these escalation processes, being the time factor.
A level one escalation can only be initiated if no EDI (electronic data interchange) response is received after eight hours.
A level two escalation can then only be initiated if no response is received again after eight hours.
In effect, eight hours is lost for each escalation process and several days may be lost before the issue is resolved and the goods released.
The objective of an escalation is to achieve a quicker result, and it is clear that while the escalation processes may appear to be of benefit to trade, they are ineffective when monitoring turnaround times.
For time-sensitive air freight consignments, it could be 16 hours before a customs operations manager is notified, and this defeats the objective of an escalation.
There is, of course, the basic question of why the need to escalate unfinalised cases if customs officers at the front line carried out their duties efficiently, and escalations should really only take place due to technical faults.
