A regional Authorized Economic Operator (AEO) and Mutual Recognition Arrangements / Agreements (MRAs) Workshop on Raising Awareness for Development of Regional Cooperation & Strategy for the WCO Asia/Pacific region was held at the Customs Training Institute (CTI) of the Japan Customs, from 16 to 20 December 2019. The workshop was funded by the Japan Customs Cooperation Fund (CCF) and supported by the WCO Asia/Pacific Regional Office of Capacity Building (ROCB). Twenty-five (25) representatives from twenty (21) Customs administrations attended the workshop.
Unlike former regional workshops, this event concentrated more on the current challenges encountered by the Members in implementing AEO programmes such as standardization of the programmes for easier Mutual Recognitions (MR), on how standardized validations can help achieve more harmonization hence the use of the WCO AEO Validator Guidance and Training Module, using Trader Identification Number (TIN) to overcome MR communications /exchanges, while acknowledging the need for AEO programmes to move forward to the next level.
The workshop also benefitted from a site visit and a mock validation exercise giving everyone a chance to share the differences and similarities of each other’s validation techniques while addressing the concerns of participants that have not done/started validation yet. The workshop provided for a dynamic exchange and learning platform while recognising the differences in the challenges, implementation, local environment, business models of everyone’s programmes. This lead to the discussion of a possible regional cooperation and strategy to address the need of the region in a more focus and targeted way to further secure and facilitate global trade by taking into account the draft concepts of AEO 2.0.
All the participants actively participated in the discussions and exercises, and presented the next steps for their administrations following the lessons learned from the workshop. It was concluded that a validators training session should be conducted in the Asia/Pacific region in the near future.
The region boasts twelve (13) operational AEO programmes to-date, three (3) programmes under development, while two (2) programmes were launched very recently and approximately fifty-five (55) MRAs signed with forty (40) additional MRAs being negotiated. The rest of the Members are in the process of developing legislation, putting in place the next steps or looking at a compliance programme to start with.