Azernews.Az

By Aynur Karimova

Azerbaijan, which has recently turned into a coordination center for large-scale regional projects, eyes expanding multilateral cooperation in the customs field.

Major-General Igbal Babayev, the department head at the Azerbaijani State Customs Committee, said the Committee plans to sign agreements with Turkey and Kazakhstan in 2016 on exchange of preliminary information on goods and vehicles moving across the border.

“We have defined three priority lines as part of the strategy for ensuring development of the information technologies in the customs sphere. Improving the relations between the State Customs Committee and customs services of other countries is among them,” he told Trend.

Azerbaijan has already signed relevant agreements with Uzbekistan, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine and Moldova on exchange of preliminary information on goods and vehicles moving from other countries to Azerbaijan and vice versa.

“Currently, we are working out a similar project with Turkey, Iran, Kazakhstan and other CIS countries,” Babayev said.

Exchange of preliminary information speeds up the process of goods’ passage across the border and will enable to use risk management to learn about the risks and minimize the risks of counterfeit goods beforehand.

"Other two priority lines for developing the information technologies in the customs field are the improvement of “business-customs” and "customs-state” partnership," Babayev stated, adding that the work is underway for totally switching to full use of information technologies in the customs sphere.

Currently, around 95 percent of the customs bodies’ activity has been transferred to the e-platform.

“Thus, we indicated 14 e-services on our website as part of “business-customs” partnership. Nine of these services are also available on the e-government portal,” he added.

After restoring its independence in 1991, Azerbaijan established the State Customs Committee in January 1992 under a presidential decree.

The Committee fulfilled the forecast of deductions by 100.1 percent in 2015, by transferring 1.592 billion manats ($1 billion) to the budget (a 81.1 million manats ($51.1 million) or 5.4 percent growth during a year). The income from the organizations financed from the state budget amounted to 222.6 million manats ($140 million) or by 7.4 percent or 15.3 million manats ($9.64 million) more than in 2014.

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Aynur Karimova is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Aynur_Karimova

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