Legislative Observatory
European Parliament
Please fill in this field to find a procedure

Action programme for customs (Customs 2020), 2014-2020

2011/0341A(COD)

This Commission staff working paper on the Customs 2020 programme concerns the progress report for 2016.

The report highlighted that 2016 was the third year of activities under the Customs 2020 programme and in many ways similar to 2015. The indicators give an overall positive assessment.

The numbers of actions, events and participants remained at high levels, testifying to a strong demand from business owners and national administrations for programme activities.

Budget and new joint action (expert teams): there were no significant changes to the budget, notwithstanding a slight increase in committed expenses dedicated to the new type of joint actions introduced during the year - the expert teams.

In the area of joint actions, an innovative instrument called expert teams was rolled out in the Customs 2020 programme. The expert teams are flexible structures that allow to further both EU-wide and regional co-operation between national customs administrations in order to support daily operational work as identified by the Member States. Three expert teams were launched in 2016 in the area of cooperation to manage the eastern and south-eastern land border (CELBET), making best use of resources in customs classification issues (Binding Tariff Information - BTI) and in customs laboratories. While the BTI and laboratories teams only started their work in 2016, but the first results will be visible in 2017, in the case of CELBET significant progress was already registered during the year.

The key observations that can be deduced from the analysis of the performance measurement framework indicators in 2016 are as follows:

  • strong demand for programme support: this can be seen in the stable levels of the number of activities, organised events and participation levels. These levels are high and similar to 2015 numbers;
  • high level of achievement of results of the joint actions is reported by the action managers: the measured level of 3 corresponds to ‘results achieved to a large extent’. This is the case for all joint actions, but especially for working visits. This indicates that the business owners see the value of the programme for achieving the policy objectives;
  • very positive assessment of the achieved results of the joint actions, their usefulness and met expectations by national customs officials who participated in them: with minor fluctuations between the two years, the values remain high and above targets. This shows that the programme participants find that the programme activities correspond to their stated objectives and are professionally useful to them;
  • networking among programme participants remains high: with smaller fluctuations, the networking indicator remains high and testifies to the networking value provided to the participants by the programme;
  • raising awareness about the programme and its potential among the target audience: this is an important precondition to fulfilling the programme’s objectives. The awareness is measured through the Programme Poll, which is distributed in all the customs administrations of the participating countries every 18 months. The report observed that 55% of all customs officials in Europe are aware of the Customs 2020 programme, which represents a rise in the awareness of 4% compared to the 2014 Poll;
  • the European Information Systems are regularly upgraded and improved and resistant to increased volume of data traffic: the volume of data traffic on European Information Systems increased by a large margin in 2016, while the performance and availability remained very high. One new system was launched and new developments are largely taking place in line with the planning. The systems are regularly maintained and updated and the user support and training are functioning properly;
  • successful introduction of the expert teams tool: while the teams are at various stages of their work, the CELBET team already made significant progress in 2016. The first results include mapping and analysis of the non-commercial border crossing points and the carrying out of joint operational random controls;
  • significant increase in new training modules and trained customs officials: an extensive UCC EU eLearning programme has been developed and deployed in support of the implementation of the new Union Customs Code (UCC). In total, 23 685 customs officials were trained using available eLearning modules. This represents an equivalent of 1 080 classroom classes or 4 classes daily during the whole year of 2016. In addition, the UCC EU eLearning courses have been downloaded almost 10 000 times via the public website EUROPA in 2016. 

The Commission concluded that the 2016 the programme was on course to fulfilling its objectives and that it played an important role in facilitating the implementation and development of Union customs policy through its European Information Systems, joint actions and human competency building.