Policy & Compliance
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BIFA is concerned that trucks are regularly delayed for up to three days whilst relatively simple queries are resolved
for use in December 2021. BIFA had warned HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), on behalf of Members, that the time period for testing and familiarisation was insufficient – a valuable lesson for HMRC and other government departments. For many years there has been a growing concern that HMRC officers have become too remote from frontier operations, a scenario exacerbated by Border Force undertaking frontier inspections on behalf of HMRC. Since 1 January 2022, whilst BIFA notes that individual HMRC officers are endeavouring to ensure that GVMS functions, we believe that officials not sufficiently familiar with how the frontier operates are making policy decisions without adequate consultation, hampering their colleagues’ efforts to create a workable model.
Another issue that BIFA has highlighted is the fact that in inventory-linked systems, the operational process and the order in which things are done is driven by the inventory, which is not the case with GVMS, leading to procedural variations that directly cause non-compliance issues. An example being ferry operators not correctly ‘boarding’ a Goods Movement Reference (GMR), which creates additional work for other parties in the supply chain, who then have to manually ‘arrive’ the Customs declaration in order to clear the goods. The fact that in many cases GVMS does not provide sufficient visibility to all parties about the status of the Customs declaration and GMR also causes problems. Some of the issues that the logistics sector has raised have not been addressed, leading to widespread non-compliance affecting 10%-20% of all road freight movements between the EU and UK. The most common issue being the failure to attach all the relevant Customs declarations to the GMR. The other frequently reported issue is that hauliers are failing to report to Inland Border Facilities (IBF) as required, with BIFA Members having to direct drivers to go to an IBF because they
Customs procedure concerns The BIFA secretariat and the trade association’s wider
membership have frequently warned HMRC that the haulage sector, especially where owner drivers transport the goods, often have little knowledge of Customs procedures. Their primary role is to transport cargo and there could be compliance issues.
March 2022
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