The new edition of the WCO Harmonized System (HS) Nomenclature entered into force on 1 January 2017. The changes in HS 2017 encompass 242 sets of amendments relating to a wide range of products and product groups, including:
New tools have recently been developed as part of the WCO’s Revenue Package, which collates all material relevant to improving revenue collection and compliance levels.
Diagnostic Tool on Tariff Classification, Valuation and Origin Work and...
The WCO recently launched a new online platform, WCO Trade Tools (www.wcotradetools.org), which offers a single point of access to:
In addition to a user-friendly interface design and efficient search engines, the platform enables users to:
Harmonized System (HS)
Preferential Rules of Origin
More information
www.wcotradetools.org
publications@wcoomd.org
A new e-learning course introducing the concepts and elements of commodity classification according to the Harmonized System (HS) has been published on CLiCK!, the WCO learning platform for Customs officers. It complements the...
Classifying goods in the Harmonized System (HS) requires specific knowledge and skills, and, in some cases, a thorough understanding of the rules that govern it. While machine learning technology has enabled the development of various classification tools, these “are designed to assist clas...
To guide Customs administrations in their efforts to train their staff, the WCO Secretariat has developed the Strategic Guidance for Competency Development in the area of Tariff Classification of Goods for Customs Administrations. The guidance outlines a four-level competency development...
Three HS Recommendations were adopted by the WCO Council in June 2023. These Recommendations relate to expected amendments and invite Parties to the HS Convention to insert new subheadings in their national statistical nomenclatures as an interim measure until the next version of the HS enters in...
Waste oils
Parties are invited to insert under the 6-digit subheading 2710.91 a national subheading for waste oils “containing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) at a concentration level of 50 mg/kg or more”, and anothe...
The current subheading 2710.91 covers waste oils containing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polychlorinated terphenyls (PCTs) or polybrominated biphenyls (PBBs), without any specific concentration.
These new provisions will assist countries to collect data on the transboundary movement o...
Greening the HS is on the agenda, but how best to do it? To find answers to this question, the WCO is organizing a series of five symposia from October 2022 to January 2023. You may join the events either in-person, at the WCO headquarters in Brussels, or online vi...
To enable private and public stakeholders share their ideas and HS amendment proposals, the WCO Secretariat is organizing a series of symposia which will each look at a different area of the HS (see box). There are principles governing the creation or amendment of a provision in the HS, and how t...
All strategic goals with regard to Tariff and Trade Affairs (TTA) have been successfully accomplished over the past year. This was evidenced by the significant workload of the WCO Secretariat’s TTA Directorate in 2016, with 45 days of meetings held, more than 4,000 pages of docume...
WCO Revenue Package and advance rulings
The WCO continued to assist its Members in implementing the Revenue Package, which provides guidance and best practices for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of revenue collection, as well ...
Nomenclature and classification
The WCO continued to carry out its work on the uniform application of the Harmonized System (HS), with the adoption of numerous classification decisions and intensified capacity building ef...
Technical assistance
Capacity building activities included the organization of eight training workshops:
The WCO Secretariat has set up a team to study the possibilities for potential improvements to the HS and its tools. The team will collect views and suggestions from stakeholders. Details of how you can get involved in the HS Study can be found at the end of this a...
The system as a whole is largely unchanged from when it came into force in 1988, i.e., 34 years ago. The core elements of the HS, namely the General Interpretative Rules and the four-digit heading structure, are older still as they were taken over, with a few changes, from the predecessor of the ...
For this purpose, the WCO Secretariat has been given a mandate to establish a small project team for a two-year period. The team is tasked with collecting views and suggestions from stakeholders, studying the health of the system, and reporting to the WCO’s Members on the possibilities for pote...
Our top priority is engagement with, and the participation of, stakeholders, including Member administrations, international organizations, industry and sector associations, and the trade community.
Do you want to tell us what you think? Then check our website for details of how you can ge...
Brazil is on the cusp of a groundbreaking transformation, with the rollout of an upgraded version 2.0 of its Foreign Trade Single Window, the Portal Único Siscomex. A core innovation within the Portal is the introduction of a catalogue describing products using pr...
In Customs goods nomenclatures, some goods are subsumed within a broader group of goods in the same classification. As they are hidden as an unknown quantity within the broader class of goods with which they share a classification, enforcing regulations on the cross-border movements of these good...
Product Catalogue
Once attributes are identified for each CMN code, exporters and importers are asked to register the products they currently trade or plan to trade, and to provide an accurate description using the attri...
The Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System, generally referred to as “Harmonized System” or simply the “HS”, is seldom mentioned in the pages of this magazine. It is, however, one of the WCO’s flagship instruments. One can even say that it is the backbone of ...
While the Harmonized System, or HS, celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, it is, in fact, much older because it was developed over several years starting in the 1970s. Having worked on HS matters for at least 40 years, both within Danish Customs and at the WCO Secretariat, I have ...
As the WCO celebrates the 30th anniversary, in 2018, of the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System, more popularly known as the Harmonized System or the HS, the question may be asked whether the time has come to contemplate a major overhaul o...
The changing uses of the HS
The HS causes individual goods to be put into classes so that administrations can decide what to do about these goods as a group: charge a particular rate of duty, require an import permit, check for insect con...
How the Harmonized System supports a safer, greener world by specifying goods of environmental concern or interest.
“Here be dragons”
Dragons and other mythological beasts...
Goods posing environmental risks
In every new edition of the HS, there are changes designed to make it simpler for administrations to monitor and control the trade in goods posing an environmental risk. For example, goods...
Good trade-related policy requires good trade data.
While it may occasionally be necessary to implement policies and trade measures without a data-driven understanding of the underlying trade, there is always the risk that doing so could deliver unpredictable results or miss the desired ob...
There is a lot of trade in this commodity – why doesn’t it have its own HS Code?
Every good is classified, but not all goods are specified by name in their own HS code. The question of the varying levels of specificity around goods ...
Why is country x classifying this item differently from country y?
One question that arose frequently during the early days of the pandemic was why differen...
Here are the points worth considering.
A clear rationale – the “Why”
Why would this proposal represent a good use of an HS code? There are millions of products, but there is limited capacity in a usable Customs nomenclature w...
In January 2018, the Ghanaian government notified the WCO Secretariat that it had accepted seven Harmonized System (HS)-related WCO Council Recommendations, testimony to its strong commitment to implement objective, predictable and transparent classification pr...
At the time of the effective takeover in September 2015, a new facility that would subsequently be known as the Customs Technical Services Bureau was already in place at Customs Headquarters, and, within it, a National Classification Centre. There was also a pool of experienced officers to man th...
Appropriate policies and sound legal and regulatory frameworks are necessary conditions to make international trade a virtuous engine to eradicate poverty and hunger, and to promote prosperity and sustainable development.
On 25 September 2015, the 193 Member States of the United Nations (U...
The WCO website tells us that tariff classification using the Harmonized System (HS) Nomenclature “allows a world of many languages to speak with one.” As we mark the 30th anniversary of the official adoption of the HS in 1988, few could argue against the value of this universal la...
As industry continues to innovate, the work on amending the Harmonized System is never complete. This article looks at the origin and evolution of LED products to illustrate how the System can adapt to product developments over time, lighting the way for traders an...
The WCO’s Harmonized System, or HS, is a vital element of Customs. But classification systems are common, so what makes a specialized Customs classification system so important that Customs administrations continue to put much work and time into having their own classification system? The HS do...
It is also the instrument for most trade agreements, ensuring a common understanding of goods among the parties to an agreement. Through its provision of data for statistical analysis, it has an indirect, but essential role in many more policy areas. Some HS updates are specifically made to assis...
Trade operators required to classify their goods in the Unified Customs Tariff of countries belonging to the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC) now have a helpful application (app) at their disposal. The app, called Al Munasiq (The Harmonizer), enables the...
Based on machine learning, which is the development of algorithms that learn from experience, the app compares the photo/picture received with those in its library. The Google Cloud Vision API was used to integrate vision detection features within the application, including image labelling. The o...
How does a specific product become the subject of a global classification decision at the WCO? What information is considered when amendments are made to the Harmonized System (HS) nomenclature? And how can a company or industry sector engage at the WCO to supp...
Lack of transparency on cross-border procedures has been identified as one of the first “choke points” in global supply chains. To provide economic operators with easy access to Customs tariffs as well as a clear view of measures to be taken when importing or e...
The latest global multilateral trade agreement, the Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) of the World Trade Organization (WTO), stipulates in its Article 1 (“Publication and availability of information”) that each WTO Member must promptly publish trade-related and Customs-related information i...
Several government and private stakeholders are involved in the clearance of imported food products. To ensure a smooth process, close coordination and sharing of information backed by robust information technology (IT) processes are needed. With this in mind, Indi...
Mapping
As part of India’s efforts to facilitate cross-border trade, the FSSAI has mapped ITC HS Codes relating to food products with the corresponding FCS and related Food Safety and Standards Regulations. Although a s...
Ensuring that the tariff classification of a good is correct is of paramount importance in several ways for any Customs administration. In particular, this provides good visibility of foreign trade through the collection of reliable statistics on volumes of trade in products, whether imported or ...
In January 2020, before the procedure was brought into effect, Customs was given assistance by two experts from the WCO Secretariat, seconded to it as part of the European Union-funded programme called “
The Czech Customs laboratory celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2023. Its history goes back to the creation of Czechoslovakia, after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in 1918 at the end of World War I.
First known as the Chemical and Technical Testing Laboratory, it...
Staff
Today, CTL employs more than 50 specialists and technicians. Customs laboratories differ from other laboratories in that they have to analyse all types of products, mainly for the purposes of Customs classification,...
The Harmonized System (HS) contains many formulas linking goods and their use. Such connection formulas add complexity to the classification of goods as they are not always well defined and the difference between them is not always...
Almost exclusive use
The wording “solely or principally” is also used, implying an almost exclusive use.
The Southern African Customs Union (SACU) consists of five Member States – Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Namibia and South Africa – with a combined population of over 63 million people and a combined GDP in excess of 300 billion US dollars. It is the oldest functioning Customs Union in the wor...
In order to promote uniform classification of goods within the Customs Union and contribute to the overall management of the CET, the SACU Secretariat has in recent years been working with the WCO Secretariat as part of a specific capacity building programme funded by the European Union (EU): the...
This article looks at the close relationship that exists between rules of origin (ROO) and goods classification work. It argues that a change in tariff classification should remain the predominant criteria for expressing substantial transformation, and that the rev...
Impact of a technical update
From an origin expert point of view, HS amendments are not always welcomed. Each time the HS is reviewed and a new edition released, countries must, on average, update perhaps...