OREANDA-NEWS. April 13, 2009. A session of the Customs Committee of the Union State was held in Rechitsa on April 10 to consider the introduction of latest information technologies to the work of customs services of Belarus and Russia. Representatives of the Customs Control Committee of the Finance Ministry of Kazakhstan took part in this session for the first time as observers.

After the session Andrei Belyaninov, Chairman of the Union State Customs Committee and chief of the customs service of Russia, said that “the meetings in the troika format will become regular in order to accelerate work to harmonize the customs legislation. This should result in the establishment of the full-fledged Customs Union of three states.”

Alexander Shpilevsky, Chairman of the State Customs Committee of Belarus, told reporters that at present 95% of the customs tariffs between the states have been unified. “We can say that the greater part of work has been done, now some technicalities are being fine-tuned and it is quite possible to complete this work by January 1, 2010.” At the same time, he underlined that the contribution of customs officers in this work is about 10%, the remaining part of the work should be delegated to other bodies.

A great attention is attached to information cooperation between the customs bodies. The decisions that were taken at the session of the Customs Committee of the Union State will help accelerate the clearance procedures at checkpoints from 40 minutes to 7-10 minutes. Apart from that, a system to control the movement of goods in the real-time mode will be created in the near future. The session defined the procedures of exchanging information about transited goods and issue of transit permits.