New customs declaration rules for Customs Union corporations in 2011

The Customs Union will have a unified structure of digital copies. It will be filled in in line with common rules in the three countries of the Customs Union.

Instructions to fill in the declarations were not available when Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia started working on the Customs Union's Customs Code on 1 July 2010. Now the instructions have been approved by the Customs Union Commission and will be enforced on 1 January 2011.

New merchandise declarations will be used as well as new transit declarations and new commodity classifiers. Belarus' Customs also passed several resolutions on electronic structures and peculiarities of filling in certain fields in the customs declarations.

Vladimir Orlovsky specified that the new rules will apply to juridical persons that present their commodities for customs processing.

"We have tested the system and believe that everything will be okay," said the representative of Belarus' Customs.

The official admitted that the new rules may cause certain difficulties for economic entities. With this in mind an information center has been set up by the State Customs Committee of Belarus. Its services will be available in Minsk at 9:00-18:00 via a phone hotline 219 41 00. Most experienced customs officials will work in the center, including those that had taken part in working out resolutions of the Customs Union Commission and legal acts of the State Customs Committee of Belarus. After the information center is shut down, consultations will be available from the State Customs Committee and customs houses in a routine manner.