The Customs, Excise and Preventive Service (CEPS) has upgraded its automated system for processing customs declarations and payments to improve revenue collection and make a positive impact on the clearance process. The Ghana Customs Management System (GCMS), according to a statement by CEPS, had the capacity to integrate cargo manifest electronically from carriers to the system, select cargo to be examined through its risk management module, validate declarations record customs payments and generate related reports. “It can also process all the relevant customs operations such as warehousing, free zones, transit, trans-shipment, and temporarily vehicle importation (TVI).” Following the launch of the GCMS in 2003 by CEPS in collaboration with the Ghana Community Network Services (GCNet), revenue mobilisation shot up from GH¢600 million in 2002 to GH¢1.93 million. Now, despite this success and the positive impact on revenue mobilisation and trade facilitation, CEPS has launched an upgraded version, GCMS 2, following “a thorough and collective review of the system with stakeholders.” This review, CEPS said, identified the need to modify certain features of the system, for example, the manifest module, so as to meet emerging exigencies or operational requirements. According to CEPS, although GCMS “2” followed the same workflow process as GCMS and had similar fields, it differed in a number of ways and had more improved functions. It said whereas GCMS was character based, GCMS “2” was browser based and better systems navigation. GCMS “2” also runs on completely new system architecture with secure access to several communication applications that include intranet, internet and a dedicated network link. “It thus expands the possibilities for deployment in diverse environments depending on the available communication network.” The new system, CEPS said, provided greater field space for goods description, capturing of the actual arrival, departure and discharge dates of carriers, new warehousing module to facilitate an improved inventory control or warehoused and ex-warehoused goods as well as free zone consignment while temporary vehicle importation and head load modules had also been redesigned to make them simpler. CEPS said the new system would ease their work while for stakeholders, their declarations were expected to be reviewed faster and their consignments cleared more expeditiously. “As a result of the improvements made in certain modules, it takes a lesser time to process a declaration involving an improved module. As a result, relatively more of such declarations are expected to be processed over the same period than it used to take to process them previously,” it said. Source: GNA