Policy & Compliance
bugs, which is very similar to the current CDS experience. What most people remember now is CHIEF in its later life when it was very reliable. At the start it was most certainly not! Still, having spoken to industry experts and HMRC officers, we can only recall two major outages in 30 years. One of them is believed to have been caused by someone cutting through a cable – hence the benefit of Cloud-based services some may say. The other was caused by an agent trying to send a file with 250,000 declarations and because they did not get a response within 5 seconds – optimistic even for CHIEF – they kept pressing ‘send’ and blocked ‘the pipes’, which took the system out for 48 hours. In CHIEF’s defence, one could argue that neither case was actually the fault of CHIEF. Many upgrades It is also worth reminding users that towards the end CHIEF had had so many upgrades – SAD H being the last major one – that, to quote an industry insider “some said when you lifted the lid it looked like it was held together with duct-tape and sticking plasters – but still it did what it said on the tin”. Nothing lasts forever though and even a system as reliable as CHIEF needs a break, so around 2013 HMRC started planning for CHIEF’s replacement. After 20 years, the platform CHIEF had been built on was feeling its age. It was also becoming expensive and difficult to maintain. But most importantly CHIEF, built around the EDIFACT and SAD formats, could not meet the requirements of the Union Customs Code (UCC) and the new Customs data model implemented alongside it. This is when the Customs Declaration Service enters the stage. Built on a different premise, modular, more flexible and, most importantly, compatible with a new Customs data model, we hope CDS will provide a worthy successor to the tried and tested CHIEF. Will it be with us for 30 years? In an even faster changing world this does not seem realistic, but then who would have thought in the late 1980s that a system in development then would still be up and running in 2024.
2010, the system’s management was handed over from BT to Aspire, a joint Venture between Capgemini and Fujitsu. It was a move criticised by many later and the contract was terminated in 2017. Few may now remember, but when CHIEF was first launched it followed a very similar release pattern to that which we have seen June 2024 – Farewell to CHIEF and welcome CDS “ Built on a As we reach the end of the unexpectedly long CHIEF era, can we expect similar longevity from its successor, the Customs Declaration Service?
T uesday 4 June, 2024, marks a historic moment for Customs agents and freight forwarders in the UK. On this day, the Customs Handling of Import and Export Freight (CHIEF) system will be switched off for general use and made accessible to only a very limited number of users under emergency conditions. In the freight forwarding industry, few systems can be compared with CHIEF and the impact it has had. And CHIEF itself was not the first electronic Customs data processing system. Before CHIEF it was DEPS, ACP80 & ACP90, Travicom and even earlier some may remember the London Airport Customs Electronic Data Processing Scheme (LACES) – Launched in 1994 and originally developed and managed by BT, CHIEF was in operation for 30 years. The development works started in the late 1980s after a series of issues related to a short-lived Customs system developed by Travicom. In allegedly the first electronic Customs computer system.
different premise, modular, more fl exible and, most importantly, compatible with a new Customs data model, we hope CDS will provide a worthy successor to the tried and tested CHIEF
for the implementation of its replacement, the Customs Declaration Service (CDS). Complex processes
The imports module went live first, and exports followed a few months later. The reasons behind that schedule were also very similar to those behind the release schedule of CDS – namely the complexity of the export process where different parties assume different roles in an environment which is different to that of an inventory-linked import. And CHIEF was not perfect to begin with. Industry veterans may remember this, when CHIEF went live in 1994 it did so with 100s of live
10 | June 2024
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