By the very nature of their activities, Customs administrations are vulnerable to various sorts of corruption – from the payment of a bribe to large-scale fraud. Since the adoption of the Arusha Declaration in 1993, which was later revised in 2003, the WCO has developed several tools to help it...
An e-learning module on Internal Affairs was released in January 2023 on CLiKC! – the learning platform developed by the WCO for Customs officers. The course was first released in English, but will be available in French, Portuguese, Arabic and Spanish by the end of March 2023.
The WCO...
Through discussions held at meetings of WCO working bodies and following integrity development assessments conducted with administrations over the years, the WCO Secretariat identified the need to provide support on this topic and develop a training curriculum on Internal Affairs-related processe...
This article outlines the case for Customs administrations to use ‘Collective Action’ to fight corruption and, by doing so, improve Customs policy and its implementation, increase duty and tax collection rates and support government anti-corruption efforts, whi...
In 2008, a huge corruption scandal involving officials from the public sector and representatives from the private sector shook Uruguay’s foreign trade community, as well as its international trading partners: 11 Customs officials working at Carrasco International Airport and 25 Customs brokers...
The WCO has taken several steps to strengthen performance measurement culture among Customs administrations. These have included looking at how performance measurement can be applied to fighting corruption. This article looks at the new approaches to measuring ...
New responses to measuring integrity
Despite not being an entirely new area of work, measuring corruption and integrity has remained a challenge. As noted in the publication of the World Bank’s “
Companies operating in global supply chains face a number of systemic corruption issues, such as demands for ‘facilitation’ payments or extortion for bribes, when trading goods across borders. National anti-bribery legislation in many countries and extraterritorial regulations, such as the Un...
Collective action to promote integrity in the maritime sector
The year 2015 left an indelible imprint on Guatemala’s history. President Otto Pérez Molina and Vice President Roxana Baldetti were arrested over their alleged involvement in La Línea or “the line,” the name given to a multimillion-dollar fraud scheme invol...
According to a survey conducted in a Latin American country on behalf of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the perception of corruption leads to actual corruption.
The survey showed a ‘statistically significant’ increase in respondents’ willingness to bribe a police officer ...
In its drive to combat corruption and promote integrity, the WCO has always advocated the creation of partnerships, in particular with the private sector as set out under key factor 10, entitled “Relationship with the Private Sector”, of the Ghana’s collective action on tackling corruption in Customs In the light of its scoping work under the WCO A-CIP Programme, the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) reported the need for more active and impactful stakeholder engagement. Expand...
The WCO Secretariat, while supporting Customs administrations in their efforts to combat corruption and safeguard integrity, identified through its Anti-Corruption and Integrity Promotion (A-CIP) Programme recurring questions regarding anti-corruption measures for ...
The Helpdesk team receives corruption-related enquiries and, in response, provides within ten working days a synthesis of the state of research on a particular topic, lessons learned from case studies, and practical recommendations for anti-corruption approaches. The team does not answer question...
China Customs has rolled out a series of measures to enhance staff integrity at all administrative levels and to promote trader compliance across all sectors. Four of the latest initiatives introduced in this regard are described below, namely the extension of the ...
In today’s highly interdependent world economy, business and societies depend on the efficient clearance of vessels and goods in ports worldwide to function, develop and prosper. More than 80% of world trade is transported by sea and via ports, and any business that is part of global supply cha...
Why tackle corruption in ports?
Corruption comes with a cost to business and societies. The impact of corruption in ports has been documented in several studies and through data collected by the Maritime Anti-Corruption N...
Using industry data to identify and address corruption
In 2019, MACN and CBi introduced an Anti-Corruption HelpDesk for the maritime private sector and vessels calling at ...
Operation TIN CAN was the first enforcement activity actively involving the shipping industry to combat the contamination of legitimate cargo with drugs through the rip-on/rip-off method. This article explains how it opened new horizons for enhancing the capacity o...
We are not talking about “small” quantities. In 2020, police in Costa Rica made the biggest seizure of drugs in the country’s history, finding more than five tons of cocaine in 202 suitcases which had been placed in a container with a consignment of flowers headed for the Netherlands. T...
Testing technology
Drugs used to be found mainly inside bags near the door of the container and were therefore visible once it was opened. Nowadays, however, they are more likely to be found behind the first rows of boxes...
One of the difficulties in reforming African public administrations derives from the absence or weakness of proper instruments to monitor public action. There is a direct link between bad practices, corruption and a lack of results. For Customs, an improvement in governance automatically brings a...
In 2015, the Kingdom of Morocco adopted a National Anti‑Corruption Strategy, the implementation of which is overseen by a steering committee chaired by the Prime Minister. This article sets out the approach adopted by Moroccan Customs in this area, an approach fu...
For each operational process, risk indicators and sensitive stages have been identified. Risks associated with the import process include:
Under the leadership of President Suharto, Indonesia built one of the world’s largest bureaucracies. It suffered from a range of problems including rampant corruption, inefficiency and poor service delivery. Following democratization in 1998, the country’s political leaders experimented with ...
Gratification, by contrast, is the receipt by civil servants or state administrators, by virtue of their position, of a gift in the broadest sense, in a manner which is incompatible with their obligations and duties. This includes the provision of money, goods, rebates (discounts), commissions, i...
In 2017, we described in the pages of this magazine how the new management team of the Superintendence of Tax Administration (SAT) undertook major reforms following the ...
Since its formation in September 2016, the Committee has proved to be an efficient cooperation mechanism providing suggestions for procedures and processes to be developed or enhanced to make legitimate transactions faster and more transparent, efficient and secure. It monitors, for example, the ...