23rd September 2020 –
NDO – By the end of August 2020, there were 200 administrative procedures of 13 ministries and sectors connected to the National Single Window, an increase of 12 procedures compared to 2019, featuring over 3.2 million records and 40,000 enterprises.
The statistics were announced at a meeting of the National Steering Committee for the ASEAN Single Window (ASW), National Single Window (NSW) and Trade Facilitation (Commission 1899), presided over by Deputy Prime Minister Pham Binh Minh at the Hanoi-based Government Headquarters on September 22.
Reports at the meeting showed that the concerned ministries and agencies have built and completed connection checks, as well as preparing to officially connect 14 new administrative procedures by the Ministry of Industry and Trade (six procedures), the Ministry of Defence (six procedures) and the Ministry of Health (two procedures) to the NSW. For the health ministry, there are also nine newly developed administrative procedures that are currently in the process of testing.
Regarding the ASW mechanism, Vietnam has also connected with five more ASEAN countries, including Brunei, Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos and the Philippines, bringing the total number of connected member countries to nine. The total number of certificates of origin (C/O) Vietnam has received from ASEAN countries is over 179,000 while the total C/O sent to ASEAN member states stands at over 263,000.
Specialised inspection continued to achieve positive results, in which the proportion of import and export consignments subjected to specialised inspection at the customs clearance stage decreased from 33% to 19%.
Speaking at the meeting, Deputy PM Pham Binh Minh, who is also the head of Commission 1899, praised efforts by the relevant ministries and agencies in implementing the assigned tasks to achieve positive results, in the spirit of facilitating import and export activities, especially for agricultural products.
Referring to the upcoming tasks, the deputy PM proposed that the Ministry of Finance develop a project on food safety quality inspection for imported goods and submit it to the Prime Minister, while coordinating with other ministries and sectors to develop an IT system to serve the implementation of ASW and NSW mechanisms, in addition to establishing a mechanism to accelerate electronic data sharing aimed at optimising the NSW mechanism towards facilitating and reducing costs for businesses in implementing procedures.
Minh also urged relevant ministries and agencies to closely coordinate with the General Department of Vietnam Customs in the process of connecting and operating electronic procedures, as well as promptly solving problems for enterprises in the process of implementing administrative procedures.
He requested the continued issuance of the list of goods with Harmonised System (HS) codes, technical standards and regulations for the products under the management responsibility of the related ministries and agencies.