The event aimed at sharing the specifics of the requirements of the EU acquis on the registration of postal items, including low-value commodities, with Ukrainian customs officers. The above issue is currently urgent for Ukraine in terms of attempts at reducing the time for processing postal items.

At a three-day workshop, EU4PFM expert, Justas Dukavičius, covered, in detail, the following issues:

• EU customs acquis setting out the requirements applicable to import and export of low-value commodities (LVCs).
• An overview of the EU VAT e-commerce package associated with customs legislation and a comparison of the ‘Single Window’ for imports with special VAT collection mechanisms.
• Review of the state of customs formalities on LVCs after July 1, 2021, in Lithuania, problems, and ways to solve those.

At the end of the workshop, the needs of Ukrainian partners in harmonisation of national requirements to LVC customs declarations with EU customs legislation were discussed and clarified.

In the participants’ opinion, the workshop was useful for them primarily due to the emphasis on the subtleties of procedures and the accompanying information exchange between operators and express carriers on the one hand, and customs of various countries on the other hand, as well as customs and tax information exchange between countries. Today in Ukraine, there are ongoing legislative changes in the procedures of customs clearance of international postal items, which are intended to address the following tasks:

• Improving the customs clearance procedure in terms of improving security control and incident management at customs posts and Extraterritorial Offices of Exchange (ETOEs);
• Creating new conditions for citizens as regards simplification of declaration procedures and speeding up the necessary formalities associated with international postal items;
• Standardisation of informational exchange between operators and customs authorities
• Obtaining comprehensive statistics on comprehensive customs clearance processes with a view to planning improvements in postal procedures.

That is why learning the EU countries’ practices and experience will reduce the time needed to solve problems, without the need to develop everything from scratch, using existing models instead.

Ukrainian experts also expressed interest in obtaining information on perspective issues. In particular, on possible solutions to the problems of coordination of participants and information exchange, as well as methods of simplifying the procedures for declaration for public and operators. In addition, the issues of improving the quality of customs risk assessment systems and the available experience of reducing the impact of the human factor in the inspection of postal items, and completion of declarations and accrual of customs payments are of great interest. In addition, one of the most pressing issues is the methods of accelerating customs procedures in a condition of the Covid-19 pandemic through technical or organisational methods.