Unsettled valuation

by at 14/01/2013 23:49

Alexei Department of tax and customs tariff policy, Finance Ministry

Artemyev

I would like to address particularities relating to the regulation of legal relationships in customs, on the example of the valuation of goods, in the conditions of Russias membership in the WTO. With consideration of the particularities of use by WTO member countries of the system of adopted agreements in the organizations framework, the definition of customs valuation in accordance w ith WTO requirements needs some elaboration. This is prompted by the fact that the WTO agreement, including the agreement on the use of Article VII of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade of 1994 (the WTO pact on the definition of customs valuation of goods) is used by member countries not as a document of direct action, but as a way to ref lect the position of these agreements in the countries regulatory systems. Because Russia follows this same approach, in our country customs valuation has to be defined in accordance with the requirements of national (in relation to the WTO) normative regulations, the basis of which is the Customs Union agreement from Jan. 25, 2008, on the definition of valuation of goods carried across the unions customs border. And here the system of national regulation in relation to the WTO, in its turn, has to correspond to the WTOs requirements that is, in accordance with the definition of customs valuation of goods, the agreement on the use of Article VII of GATT. Long before Russias entry into GATT and the WTO, the norms in force here defining the customs valuation of goods corresponded to a significant extent to the requirements of the organization. At present, the majority of the customs valuation provisions of the WTO agreement, as much as the explanatory notes to the agreements corresponding articles, is reflected in the January 2008 Customs Union agreement. The remaining part of the provisions of the explanatory notes cannot be reflected in documents on a legislative level, and therefore come into our regulation in sublegislative normative acts. At the current time, these are decisions of the Eurasian Economic Commission. This process is moving actively enough: decisions are made by the commission, relating to rules of the use of legislatively established methods of the definition of the customs valuation of goods. One of the goals for the development of a legal basis for the definition of the customs valuation of goods is the gradual reflection, in the Customs Unions legal acts, of procedural materials developed by the Technical Committee on Customs Valuation of the World Customs Organization, with the aim of helping countries uniformly use the WTO agreement for the definition of customs valuation of goods in preparing their own national regulations.