Articles under "#Integrity" category

Issue: WCO News 91 February 2020

WCO Revised Arusha Declaration: putting integrity back in the spotlight

Since the late 1980s, WCO Members have been drawing and sharing lessons from their experiences in combating corruption and promoting integrity. They identified various factors that effective national Customs integrity programmes must address, and consolidated them into 12 and later 10 factors

Different drivers of corruption

If the word “factor” is used in the Revised Arusha Declaration, it is done so generically, referring to work areas, principles and practices that must be addressed or used to reduce or eliminate opportu...

Issue: WCO News 83

Integrity: what we have learned and what we still need to learn

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...

Issue: WCO News 100 – Issue 1 / 2023

New e-learning module on Internal Affairs

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...

Issue: WCO News 83

Fighting corruption through partnership: the Uruguayan experience

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...

Issue: WCO News 93 October 2020

WCO applies new approaches to measuring corruption and integrity

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 “

Issue: WCO News 83

Collective action to promote integrity in the maritime sector

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...

Issue: WCO News 89

Norad and the WCO launch the Anti-Corruption and Integrity Promotion Programme

In January 2019, the WCO launched the Anti-Corruption and Integrity Promotion (A-CIP) Programme to assist selected WCO Member Customs administrations in implementing measures to combat corruption and promote integrity in accordance with the 10 measures listed in the WCO Revised Arusha Declaration...

Partner administrations and expectations

Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Ghana, Lebanon, Liberia, Mali, Mozambique, Nepal, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Tunisia are the A-CIP Programme’s initial partner administrations. Each is exp...

Issue: WCO News 83

Renewing Guatemala’s Customs service

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...

Issue: WCO News 83

Perceived corruption leads to actual corruption

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 ...

Issue: WCO News 103

West and Central Africa region intensifies stakeholder engagement in anti-corruption measures

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...

Issue: WCO News 103

Engaging partners to expand evidence base knowledge: overview of the work done to shed light on the efficiency and impact of some anti-corruption measures

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...

Issue: WCO News 102 – Issue 3 / 2023

Tackling corruption in maritime trade

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 ...

Issue: WCO News 102 – Issue 3 / 2023

Combating the infiltration of criminals in the maritime supply chain: an overview of Operation TIN CAN

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...

Issue: WCO News 83

Going digital: a Tanzanian Customs broker shares his experience

Six hundred Customs brokerage companies are registered in Tanzania. Given the size and population of the country, this relatively high number of Customs brokers is due to the fact that Tanzania has three maritime ports, namely Dar es Salaam, Tanga and Mtwara, which are also used by importers and ...

Issue: WCO News 90 October 2019

Russian businesses commit to creating a better trade environment

A new tool has been developed in Russia to help create an enabling trade environment: the “Charter on Fair Participation in Foreign Economic Activity.” The Charter is the result of a series of complex consultations between government and business representatives on how the latter can back up ...

To monitor the implementation of the Customs Development Programme, 41 key performance indicators (KPIs) were identified. Those referring to the section “10 Steps to Meet Business” include the sharing of online submissions of declarations, and the sharing of automatically released ele...

Issue: WCO News 98 – Issue 2 / 2022

Control measures, paperless procedures, openness and transparency: Overview of the Customs Anti-Corruption Strategy in Morocco

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:

  • tardiness in the processing of a Customs declaration;
  • the physical inspection of the goods;
  • the re-selection of declarations fo...

Issue: WCO News 101 – Issue 2 / 2023

Fighting corruption in the form of gift-giving: the experience of Indonesia Customs

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...

Issue: WCO News 98 – Issue 2 / 2022

Strengthening Public-Private Partnership: looking at the experience of Guatemala

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 ...