The Caribbean Customs Law Enforcement Council congratulates its member administrations and the global Customs community on its observance of International Customs Day 2019.
Customs administrations in various forms have existed from time immemorial. Governments establish Customs and Excise departments for the purposes of tax collection, trade facilitation, regulation of the importation/exportation of restricted and prohibited goods, the protection of society and in more recent times terrorism detection and interdiction.
The World Customs Organization’s slogan for International Customs Day (ICD) 2019 is “SMART borders for seamless Trade, Travel and Transport.” CCLEC readily adopts same and challenges all its members to embrace these principles and strive to implement practices and processes that bring smart borders into realization.
The acronym SMART stands for: Secure, Measurable, Automated, Risk Management-based and Technology-driven. It requires Customs to innovatively drive the development of frameworks, standards and practices both academically and practically, that will greatly enhance the speed of processing and facilitating the delivery of goods, passengers and conveyances, while securing same. This creates a more enabling economic environment for national development, equity in trade and societal protections can produce safe and productive societies.
Customs must work closer with its partner organizations and the private sector to vigorously pursue and adopt technological advances, premise its activities on well implemented risk management regimes, while subjecting itself to self-monitoring and independent evaluation of all its processes which inevitably facilitates reengineering of itself and transparency before its stakeholders.
Wishing you an enjoyable and reflective International Customs Day 2019.
Albert Sandy
Permanent Secretary
Caribbean Customs Law Enforcement Council
