The General Administration of Customs and Excise.

The General Administration of Customs and Excise.

More and more cocaine is being imported through the port of Antwerp year after year. Several newspapers recently headlined that in 2022 approximately 110 tons of cocaine were intercepted by customs. These facts most likely concern only a fraction of the amount of cocaine effectively imported in the same year.

One of the solutions floated involves more resources flowing into the General Administration of Customs and Excise.

But what does that administration actually do? We are happy to explain!

Mission

First and foremost, customs carry out checks in, among other places, the Antwerp port area to verify that containers do not contain illegal goods (such as cocaine).

But the General Administration's mission is broader than merely checking the contents of containers.

Thus, on a more general level, the Administration is responsible for "protecting society and promoting international trade by managing external borders and ensuring the security of the logistics chain".

This, in turn, mainly involves customs officers checking that import duties, excise taxes and VAT have been paid correctly and also collecting these various forms of tax.

Role of the General Administration in criminal cases

Often the role of the Administration -in criminal cases- ends after it reports to the Prosecutor's Office the discovery of illegal goods, but that is not necessarily always the case.

Similarly, the General Administration regularly turns to the criminal courts to recover certain unpaid import duties and excise taxes. This will be the case when the investigation (sometimes carried out by the Administration itself) shows that no taxes were paid for a cargo of, for example, cigarettes found. If the investigation also shows that it is not the first cargo for which the defendants are allegedly responsible, the Customs will try to collect the unpaid import duties for those earlier cargoes as well.

It should be noted in this regard that such investigations conducted by the Administration itself are often conducted in a very one-sided manner, so the criminal records resulting from the investigation must be analyzed carefully.

If you have specific questions about the General Administration of Customs and Excise or would simply like more information about it, please feel free to contact us at info@bannister.be or 03/369.28.00