The World Customs Organization (WCO) and the State Customs Committee of Uzbekistan (SCC) held an on-line dialogue on Single Window (SW) on 15-16 November. The dialogue was organized under the auspices of the Mercator Programme and as part of the SECO-WCO Global Trade Facilitation Programme (GTFP)’s Country Work Plan activities in Uzbekistan for the purpose of provoking SCC’s thoughts on how to push forward the SW initiative by means of referring to relevant WCO instruments and tools.

WCO experts introduced the WCO work in this field, including the Compendium on Building a Single Window Environment, RAMMAP-SWIM, and the latest SW questionnaire.

The SCC shared Uzbekistan’s plan for establishing the national SW system and the progress it had achieved. On 12 April 2018, the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan issued a Decree on measures to radically improve the Customs service, including the development of SW. The SCC was mandated to serve as the SW coordinator.

During the online dialogue, the WCO and SCC also had discussions on questions regarding institutional arrangements for participating agencies of SW, performance measurements associated with the time for goods release and documentation processing via SW, the design of SW services and users’ needs, applicability of international standards (especially the WCO Data Model) for data harmonization in SW, etc. The discussion benefitted the SCC responsible officials in better exploring the way towards an ambitious SW blueprint.

For more information on the GTFP, please contact capacity.building@wcoomd.org.