Globally, the evasion of duties is estimated at between 20% and 30% of current global customs revenues and, nesting in the increasingly widespread electronic commerce – which now accounts for 12% of international economic exchanges – is implemented with sophisticated smuggling systems. To this end, to tackle them  the Customs Authorities have equipped themselves with remote control weapons 4.0, artificial intelligence systems and databases.

In the view of the widespread of the phenomenon, the evasion issue was the main subject of the Picard Congress 2019, held in Skopje, the annual opportunity for confrontation between the World Customs Organization (WCO) the private sector, the academy and the think tanks.

Among the numerous studies presented, the research developed by the Engineering faculty of the University of Beijing has been the most significant.

This research, in fact, shown that the evasion is highly concentrated in certain sectors and that irregularities increase in correspondence with the increase in the economic level of duties import.

In the light of this research, it emerged that the largest number of irregularities are committed by non-Aeo operators (Authorized Economic Operator), ie by those companies that have not requested customs reliability certification. In this regard, it is extremely important for companies to obtain the recognition of Aeo status in order to align themselves with the radical change in customs control philosophy, implemented no longer with a monitoring of goods (now difficult, given the volumes of traffic in constant growth) but through a preventive verification of the reliability of the operators, concentrating the investigative resources on those who are not certified.

Furthermore, at international level, it emerged that the road taken by the customs authorities to counteract evasion consists in the use of databases on the customs value of the products; but, such databases, could prove potentially risky even for operators who, although acting diligently, are not sufficiently “structured” from an administrative point of view.

It should be noted, in fact, that the Court of Cassation, in fact, has already rejected some instruments recently used by the Administration for the determination of the customs value, such as the Merce database, since it is a system not contemplated by the European customs legislation and in which they are collected only «average values» but without «providing the certainty that it is the same product purchased by the importer».