International Customs Day marked

The Customs Division of the Ghana Revenue Authority, on Wednesday January 26, 2022, joined the rest of the world to mark the International Customs Day.

The International Customs Day is celebrated every year to recognize the role of customs officials and agencies in maintaining the flow of goods across the world’s borders. It also affords the World Customs Organisation, national customs, and their stakeholders the opportunity to showcase their efforts and activities.

This year’s International Customs Day was celebrated under the theme, “Scaling Up Customs Digital Transformation by Embracing a Data Culture and Building a Data Ecosystem’’.

The Commissioner-General of the Ghana Revenue Authority, Rev. Ammishaddai Owusu Amoah, revealed that the GRA will introduce a data warehouse system to integrate the data of Customs with domestic tax as well as third party data.

“This data warehousing system will ensure that the customs data integrated into the domestic tax data and third party data which includes the DVLA, lands and many other departments. This is going to be a huge database that allows for cross-referencing and identifying opportunities for compliance as far as tax payment is concerned,” he said.

He added that the project is far advanced and expected to be completed by the middle of this year.

The Commissioner of Customs, Col. Kwadwo Damoah, delivering a speech on behalf of the Secretary-General of the World Customs Organization, Dr. Kunio Mikuriya, urged customs worldwide to build data ecosystems, and consolidate existing ones by establishing formal data governance to ensure the relevance, accuracy and timeliness of data.

The Director of Revenue Policy at the Ministry of Finance, George Winful speaking on behalf of the Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, lauded the GRA for exceeding the revenue target and spurred them on to even exceed the 80.3 billion Cedis target set for 2022.

The Director of Operations, at Ghana Link Network Services, Raymond Amaglo, in his presentation on the Integrated Customs Management System (ICUMS), touched on what is to be expected from the phase 2 of ICUMS implementation.

The International Customs Day celebration was also used to reward outstanding Customs officials.