Articles under "#fraud" category

Issue: WCO News 100 – Issue 1 / 2023

To read: WCO Trendspotter Study on Customs-Related Commercial Fraud

The WCO has published its first Trendspotter Study, with the aim of identifying trends in commercial fraud involving trade in goods. The Study was written by a project team with the assistance of experts from Customs administrations, and was funded by Korea Customs.

The Trends...

Certain areas – essentially because they are addressed at the WCO in the context of specific programmes and working bodies – were excluded from the scope of the Study: excise goods such as tobacco and alcohol products; illicit trade; transfer pricing; and money laundering. Howev...

Issue: WCO News 100 – Issue 1 / 2023
WCO Secretariat develops a dashboard for PCA

Post-clearance audit (PCA) includes a preparation phase during which data from various sources is collected and then analysed, especially import and export declaration data. The aim is to obtain a comprehensive overview of the auditee’s business structure and, on this basis, identify and analys...

At the WCO Secretariat, a modest three-person team decided to take up this matter and to develop a prototype dashboard using Microsoft Power BI. Launched nearly a decade ago as a standalone desktop data visualization tool, Power BI is now a business analytics service provided by Microsoft that en...

Issue: WCO News 77
Customs laboratories in the United States: at the frontline of fighting fraud

In late December 2010, the news broke about a Seattle court case involving counterfeit honey. A 70-year old Bellevue, Washington man, Chung Po Liu, had been sentenced to a year and a day in prison and was ordered to pay 400,000 US dollars (USD) in restitution for importing falsely declared Chines...

Changing strategies

Then the Chinese exporters changed their strategy. This time the shipments were sent from China, but they weren’t declared as honey. The shipping documents labelled the cargo as sugar syrup. “They ...

Issue: WCO News 78
E-commerce and revenue collection

Many countries have seen a significant and rapid growth in the volume of low-value imports of physical goods on which duties and taxes are not collected. There are growing concerns about matters related to potential revenue loss, fraud, and the disadvantages experi...

Issue: WCO News 77
Collaboration between the United Kingdom and the United States crushes trade fraud

After routinely targeting a car import for inspection, a US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) international trade specialist noticed an unusual cat-and-mouse move: The importer did not process the targeted vehicle for United States (US) entry and instead shipped the car, a Land Rover Defender, ...

Issue: WCO News 89
Fighting illicit financial flows: Brazilian Customs´ approach

The role of Customs has become increasingly complex over the years. On the one hand, international corporations and supply chains actors in general have put pressure on governments to shape a new operating model at the border, based on simplifying procedures and expediting the release of traded g...

Brazil’s approach

In 2014, Global Financial Integrity (GFI)[4], undertook a study in Brazil, producing a report entitled “Brazil: Capital Flight, Illicit Flows, and Macroeconomic Crises, 1960-2012....

Issue: WCO News 77
Ecuador undertakes a mirror analysis

How do we discover new fraud? On what basis and on which data do we rely in deciding when to investigate certain commodities or trade flows rather than others? Chance, intuition, experience and intelligence are useful, but can we complement them using a more object...