Customs Union auditing agencies looking into payment of import duties

Representatives of supreme financial control agencies of the three countries of the Customs Union are taking part in the joint audit. At present a joint audit is in progress to verify the observance of the Customs Union agreement on calculating and distributing import customs duties by the Belarusian Finance Ministry in 2010-2011. The audit will examine whether the Belarusian Finance Ministry has on time and in full distributed the import customs duties, which are subject to distribution between the state budgets of the Customs Union member states. Other matters will be audited, too.

The audit is performed in line with the agreement on carrying out a joint audit that was signed by the heads of the State Control Committee of Belarus, the Auditing Committee for control over the fulfillment of the national budget of Kazakhstan, and the Accounts Chamber of Russia.

The first phase of the audit took place in Astana on 17-28 September where the fullness and the timeliness of the transfer of import customs duties by the Treasury Committee of the Kazakh Finance Ministry was verified. The same audit is being performed in Minsk. After it is done, a similar audit will be carried out in Moscow on 29 October - 9 November 2012.

After the three audits are completed by the three sides, the results will be used to analyze how well the procedure used to calculate and distribute the import customs duties in the Customs Union works. A joint report on the results of the joint audit will be discussed at sessions of the boards of the supreme financial control agencies of Belarus, Russia, and Kazakhstan.