/By AzerNews/

By Nigar Orujova

The Azerbaijani State Customs Committee has introduced a 70 percent-discount on formalizing customs declarations for customs clearance of goods and vehicles, the committee reported.

This discount decreased the cost of the customs declaration formalization service up to 50 manats ($30) without VAT, starting from January 27.

The decision was made given the president's instructions to create favorable conditions for entrepreneurs, support and improve the quality of services provided to them.

The Committee has recently introduced another service to facilitate the custom procedures – e-service primary declaration-- that allows entrepreneurs importing goods into Azerbaijan to submit a brief declaration on imported goods and vehicles.

This option opens opportunity to speed up the registration process, eliminate various bureaucratic obstacles, as well as save time.

Moreover, the Committee will soon transfer several services to the ASAN service centers that already gain a reputation of comfortable and transparent agency fighting bureaucracy and corruption.

ASAN will provide its customers with electronic declaration, preliminary electronic declaration, issue of official certificates for import-export operations, and extension of stay in the country of temporarily imported cars.

Along with this, information kiosks of the Customs Committee will be installed in ASAN centers in the future.

Earlier in December, the Information Technology Center informed that electronic signature will be used while approving customs declaration in the country. The service will allow filling in e-declaration and approving them with e-signature, which in turn will contribute to the transparency of customs declaration.

The traditional method of declaration of goods involves the use of hard copy, which does not ensure efficiency. Today, Azerbaijan is developing e-services to ensure both transparency and convenience of a number of services.

Providing fast and transparent custom procedures will help to increase business development in the country, that now relying on the non-oil sector development.

Moreover, Azerbaijan also offers Tajikistan to facilitate custom procedures for its entrepreneurs.