ADCD04050 - Assurance

Fiscal controls

Local Assurance staff perform most fiscal controls - including ADD/CVD checks - previously performed at the frontier inland. Assurance will be gained by means of audit visits to importer’s premises.

There may be circumstances when ADD/CVD checks can only be effectively performed at the frontier, for example, when samples from specific consignments are required for analysis. However, these will be the exception rather than the rule.

ADD/CVD risks are assessed by the Risk and Intelligence Service (RIS), Customs Duty Liability and the Unit of Expertise (UoE) together with other international trade risks in selecting audit visits as a part of the yearly assurance programme.

Where a specific risk requires a ‘hot audit’ to be performed, for example when OLAF (EU’s anti-fraud unit) requests Member States to check the origin of goods because they suspect fraud may have taken place, the appropriate Regional risk team will be requested to visit the importer in question.

Where there is evidence that ADD/CVD, in place against country A, is being circumvented by moving the goods to country B to hide their true origin before exporting them to the EU the Commission can, following an investigation, extend the ADD to imports consigned from country B. In these circumstances new taric codes are inserted in the Tariff with specific “consigned from” nomenclature. For example:

Commodity code 1 - Consigned from country A, unless the products are in transit in the sense of Article V, GATT

Commodity code 2 - Consigned from country B

The country of consignment is the country from which goods were dispatched to the Member State of destination, regardless of the origin of the goods, without any commercial transactions or other operations which change the legal status of the goods taking place in any intermediate non-member country.

In practice this means that the ADD/CVD applies to all imports into the EU consigned from either country A or B, whether declared as originating or not, unless there is evidence that shows the goods were consigned to the EU from elsewhere and were passing through these countries in accordance with Article V of the GATT (Traffic in transit).