Tema, July 23, GNA – The Importers and Exporters Association of Ghana (IEAG) says the Integrated Customs Management System (ICUMS) has brought a lot of improvement in the clearance chain, two years after the implementation of the first phase.
Mr Jacob Agyeman, the Technical Advisor to the IEAG, at a press conference, said that compared to the previous systems, ICUMS had made it easy to navigate on one platform instead of the numerous ones used for clearance in the past.
Mr Agyeman said at a forum that the ICUMS had been able to synchronize all the previous platforms and by so doing greatly improved trade.
He said with the ICUMS, importers and exporters could get the notification at the point of a declaration which Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs), where a permit must be obtained for a consignment.
“With the help of the ICUMS, there is an automatic update of exchange rate without having to do a post-entry, this is just to mention a few of the improvements that ICUMS has brought into the clearance chain and thereby improving trade facilitation,” he said.
The Technical Advisor of the IEAG said, however, that ICUMS also has some challenges that needed to be worked on, noting that most of these challenges and weaknesses were human-induced.
He said customer-service issues bedevilled the implementation, explaining that while under the previous system, problems of stakeholders were effectively and efficiently handled with alacrity that was lacking with the ICUMS.
He added that “Stakeholders can attest that with the previous system, they were given the utmost attention, follow-ups on their problems and in some cases officers were assigned to help solve their problems, this can rarely be said about the ICUMS.”
The IEAG, therefore, recommended that technical officers should be attached to the customer-service section, as sometimes, solutions were difficult to come by, adding that there should be appropriate channels to address issues and concerns.
According to the Association, another weakness of the ICUMS was the lack of regular training and engagement of stakeholders stressing that there were instances where changes were made without stakeholders’ knowledge, as they only got to know when they got onto the system.
They also recommended that there should be regular training for the users of the system, since they were the implementers of the policy, and a good knowledge and understanding would greatly improve efficiency.
They also called for a collaboration between the ICUMS and other agencies to make it possible for the system to automatically identify commodities that needed a permit, instead of the user being required to enter it.
The IEAG noted that currently, it was only the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that the system automatically identifies commodities that require its permit, while all other agencies’ permits must be entered by the user.
“We strongly believe that ICUMS is good for trade facilitation and if these weaknesses are dealt with, it will only make it better and Ghana will become a learning point for other Africa countries in the use of technology and digitization to improve trade, especially with the in-coming of the Africa Free Continental Trade Agreement (AFCTA),” IEAG added.
Mr Samson Asaki Awingobit, the Executive Secretary of the IEAG, commended Ghana Link for a successful implementation of the ICUMS while calling on the Customs Division of the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) and other service providers to address the shortfalls of the system.
Laudia Sawer
