I became convinced of this when visiting the national customs authorities and customs administrations in Prague, Antwerp and Washington, as well as Beijing and Shanghai.

As he will know, we have taken particular interest in the dossiers, but not only that: just as he has done over the last week, on our missions around the European Union and now further afield, particularly in China recently, we have also regularly been to visit customs authorities to get a sense of their priorities and the problems they are facing on the ground; so we are much engaged with that.

(8) The experience gained by the Community from previous customs programmes has shown that bringing officials from different national administrations together in professional activities using tools such as benchmarking, project groups, seminars, workshops, working visits, training activities and monitoring actions contributes to an important extent to the achievement of the objectives of the programme.

Those teams shall, on the basis of a theme-by-theme or regional approach, visit different points in the Community customs territory where customs administrations carry out their duties.

When going through customs, there are warehouses that the government pretty much leases out or gives a contract to someone to be able to store goods before they're inspected by customs.

The proper application of tax and customs reforms was vital to the establishment of a healthy legal framework conducive to the development of business, and in particular small and medium-sized enterprises. With regard to customs, it was agreed during the visit that: - Efforts would be made to finalize, by the end of the year, a transit system that would relieve some of the burden on the frontier posts. - The Community and Poland would step up their cooperation and mutual assistance aimed at combating fraud, notably by gradually computerizing customs communications and procedures. - Pilot experiments would be conducted in the next few mon ...[+++]ths with a view to simplifying passage at certain frontier posts.