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The Bureau of Customs (BOC) formally launched the National Customs Enforcement Network (nCEN) System in aid of further developing countermeasures to combat smuggling and other forms of customs fraud
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Developed by the World Customs Organization, nCEN will assist customs administrations to collect and store law enforcement information at the national level to establish robust intelligence capabilities and enhance profiling
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The March 29 launch was in line with the implementation of Customs Memorandum Order (CMO) 08-2021, which provides guidelines on the use of the nCEN System
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BOC said 2,196 seizure cases have to date been uploaded to the nCEN database, for use in analysis of illicit trade and identify enforcement trends
The Bureau of Customs (BOC) has formally launched the National Customs Enforcement Network (nCEN) System to aid in further developing countermeasures to combat smuggling and other forms of customs fraud.
Developed by the World Customs Organization (WCO), nCEN assists customs administrations collect and store law enforcement information at the national level to establish robust intelligence capabilities and enhance profiling.
It allows customs administrations to exchange data with other nCEN users or to automatically transfer non-personal components of the data to the global Customs Enforcement Network (CEN) database.
BOC, in a statement, said that together with data from the global CEN, the nCEN “will ultimately help to efficiently gather credible intelligence information and generate accurate analysis that will significantly contribute to the quality of service that the Bureau of Customs can provide to national and global counterparts.”
The March 29 launch was in line with the implementation of Customs Memorandum Order (CMO) 08-2021, which provides guidelines on the use of the nCEN System. CMO 08-2021 took effect on February 8, 2021.
In her remarks, WCO senior technical officer of CNE Agnieszka Bielatko said: “There is one additional development in the nCEN which I’m really glad about. This development was initiated by colleagues from the Philippines. During one of our virtual meetings with the customs officers involved in the nCEN project, we discussed the idea of uploading the nCEN cases to an offline component. With the suggestion from a colleague of the Bureau of Customs, we managed to help the local nCEN users to upload the data while offline, thus, global users will greatly benefit from this new development.”
BOC’s Risk Management Office (RMO) serves as the national contact point for nCEN and will be responsible for sharing data with the global CEN. RMO will oversee the maintenance of the database of all smuggling cases, seizures and offenses, suspicions, and related data of consignees uploaded to nCEN for risk assessment.
To date, 2,196 seizure cases have been uploaded to the nCEN database for use in analysis of illicit trade and identifying trends applied in enforcement, BOC said.
