Customs requirement burden

EMCS impacts on the terminals, as it replaces the paper Accompanying Administrative Document with an electronic Administrative Document (e-AD). Governments, for their part, struggled to have their electronic gateways ready by the January 1, 2011 deadline.

The unintended effect, says Electronic Shipping Services (ESS) chief executive Alex Goulandris, has been to require all users, large and small, to use a government gateway rather than develop or acquire interfaces with EMCS to deal with high trade flows.

“The government gateways were specifically designed to handle small businesses, they are being used to effectively ‘register’ the entry of very large amounts of goods in an attempt to avoid the heavy penalties that accrue from overshooting the deadline,” he explains.

However, Mr Goulandris says that one solution toward smoothing out the process and effectively making cargo movements transparent – an advantage for ports and terminals as well as shippers – is to bring the whole thing online with an integrated web-based electronic document service.

ESS’ own web-based eAD Service, for example, has been approved by the UK’s HM Revenue and Customs and can be used in conjunction with ESS’ other services, which manage the creation and transmission of all key electronic shipping documents at a terminal, so that data only has to be inputted once.