This is part of the GH₵6.9 billion collected by the Customs Division of the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) between January and August 2020
Assistant Commissioner of Customs Emmanuel Ohene, who is the head of ICUMS project, in a presentation to journalists, noted that ICUMS has processed more than 193,000 Bills of Entry (BOEs) from March to August 2020.
He noted that Pre-Manifest Declaration (PMD) constituted 86.71% and 46.02% of BOE exited.
According to him, Tema Collection processed 47.07%, KIA Collection – 16.07%, Aflao -9.67%, and Bolga – 9.15%.
ICUMS is an end-to-end system that will increase trade facilitation and reduce the turnaround time.
ICUMS was first deployed from the start of March 2020 at selected customs land frontiers.
The next phase of deployment took place at Takoradi Port from April 1, 2020.
At Kotoka International Airport (KIA), ICUMS went live from April 20, 2020.
In May 2020, the end-to-end system was deployed for downstream petroleum operations.
The final phase of the deployment happened at Tema Port and Accra Collection from June 1, 2020.
Assistant Commissioner of Customs, Mr Ohene said deployment at 106 sites have been completed.
He said deployment at 23 sites is ongoing, and the deadline for completion was end of this month.
He said the next phase of deployment at 12 sites has been fixed for October
In total, the number of sites is 141.
The deployment covered all customs regimes and processes for sea, air, land import, export and transit-related transactions.
The head of ICUMS project explained that the first phase as deployed consisted of activities performed by existing electronic customs clearance systems, with some enhancements.
Mr Ohene said the second phase is to consist of additional features not currently provided, such as Advance Passenger Information System (APIS), the electronic wallet (e-Wallet), Authorised Economic Operators (AEO) module, post-clearance module, and other enhancements to improve on trade facilitation and revenue maximisation.
Benefits of ICUMS
H said the benefits of ICUMS includes single login with one user account, single application to fulfil all licences, certificates, permits, requirements and use of one system to track funds transfers through the banking system for purchase of goods in foreign currencies and their subsequent declaration of value based on transferred money.
The others are valuation, classification and declaration on a single report (Bill of Entry), simple queries used to correct minor errors such as typos on submitted BoEs (Bill of Entry) to avoid unnecessary post entries, declarant has the option to accept to pay a bill or reject to trigger an appeal process and change in exchange rate will not result in post entries.
He said once a declarant has nothing to petition on the report, the declarant can go ahead to make payment at the bank, even before arrival of cargo. This, he said, reduces clearance cost and time, in line with the World Customs Organisation (WCO) Trade Facilitation Agreement.
Status of activities
He said activities that have been completed include on-boarding of shipping lines to upload manifest onto ICUMS, on-boarding of terminal operators (GPHA, MPS), ICDs/CFS (Golden Jubilee Terminal, Transit Shed, TBT, Conship, etc.) to perform required tasks into ICUMS, interfacing with third-party systems for exchange of information (MPS, GPHA, BANKS, SML) and on-boarding of Customs House Agent/ Self Declarants for MDA applications and BoE.
Ongoing activities
He announced that integration with Ghana.gov has been completed and testing began September 10, 2020.
He said 1,837 internal stakeholders, made up of customs officers, internal auditors and post-clearance audit staff, and 5,368 external stakeholders have been trained.
Commissioner General of GRA, Rev Ammishaddai Owusu-Amoah said the initial challenges that were encountered have been largely resolved and the objective of ensuring that GRA has a more efficient management and collection of customs duties and taxes was being achieved
Credit: The Finder
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