Plan to reduce hours for customs clearance faces obstacles The government’s Resolution No 19 on reducing the number of hours that businesses have to spend on customs procedures has been difficult to implement.   The government’s resolution says that Vietnam has to cut the time needed for fulfilling customs procedures to the ASEAN 6 (Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Brunei) average level, or 13-14 days, by the end of 2015 and ASEAN 4 (10-12 days) by 2016.  It also points out that 300 legal documents that must be removed or amended in order to create more favorable conditions for import/export activities. However, many tasks mentioned in the resolution have not been fulfilled. Nguyen Dinh Cung, head of the Central Institute for Economic Management (CIEM), said at a conference that the target in the resolution was very ‘ambitious’ and ‘challenging’. The amendment of legal documents has hindered the process, according to Cung. Nguyen Van Than, deputy chair of the Vietnam Small and Medium Enterprise Association, said he did not think the goals set in the Resolution No 19 could be reached as scheduled, because ‘the implementation of the resolution depends on too many things, while many legal documents still have not been amended as expected’. Meanwhile, Vu Ngoc Anh, deputy general director of the General Department of Customs (GDC), when asked about the feasibility of the customs procedure cutting plan, said this would not only depend on customs agencies, but also on other state management agencies as well. Anh said that customs agencies have carried out a basic reform relating to customs clearance procedures by applying a post-clearance examination instead of pre-clearance examination. However, GDC does not have the right to make decisions related to many other issues. According to Anh, customs agencies now have to follow 19 laws, 54 government decrees and hundreds of circulars and decisions released by ministries and branches. To date, GDC has joined forces with ministries and branches to check nine out of 19 laws, 19 out of 54 decrees and 126 out of 186 ministries’ documents to find which documents need urgent amendment. An analyst noted that companies, when importing or exporting a consignment of goods, have to fulfill 25 work tasks, from customs declarations to transporting and handling goods. However, only four work tasks are related to customs agencies, and the rest has to be handled by other agencies. TBKTSG