Health checks – the diagnostic tool that makes customs clear
It’s often the case that businesses reach out to us in search of customs support, proactively striving to be compliant, but the struggle is real in that they’re unsure how to achieve this.
Here at Bethan Customs Consultancy, we flip this on its head! We believe that like all things in life, you don’t know what you don’t know, and so our first port of call is to carry out a comprehensive health check specifically designed to identify any areas of concern/ pitfalls as well as outlining our recommendations to achieve the overall goal: compliance.
What is a health check?
A health check is a thorough review of your importing and exporting systems, incorporating some or all of the following:
• selection of relevant documentation for analysis
• review, testing and compliance checking of these documents and customs entries
• identification of any areas on non-compliance
• review of HMRC Applications and Authorisations – checking these are correct and valid for individual businesses
Carrying out a health check across your importing and exporting procedures not only gives you confidence that you are fully compliant with HMRC requirements, but also helps you to identify any areas of non-compliance, and the actions needed to rectify them.
Do I need one?
To determine whether your business could benefit from a health check, it’s worth considering the following questions:
• Are you aware of what you need to do to comply with HMRC requirements?
• Do you know which steps to take to ensure that your systems are compliant?
• If HMRC requested an audit, would you feel ready and prepared?
• Could you present an audit trail documenting areas of non-compliance detected, and the actions you have taken to rectify these to HMRC?
• Has your team grown recently, and you’d like to ensure that new staff fully understand the process?
Of course, it’s understandable that many businesses, with their resources (both personnel and financial) stretched, may feel reluctant to commit to an additional project over and above their core activities. That being said, it’s absolutely worth playing the long game here!
Firstly, taking action now will correct and streamline your processes for the future, yielding both cost and labour efficiencies. Secondly, penalties imposed by HMRC for non-compliance have the potential to impact significantly on the economic stability of any business, not to mention inflict reputational harm.
As an independent customs consultancy, Bethan provides a professional dedicated health check service. We carry out a totally impartial investigation, providing clear and honest feedback that is driven only by our clients’ best interests.
What does it actually involve?
Although we tailor each and every health check to suit the needs of individual business, there is a common thread we follow. The first step is for us to request specific documentation such as MSS reports, import and export entries, HMRC Applications and Authorisations, and manifests.
We then analyse a cross-section of these, checking for compliance and identifying any areas of potential non-compliance. Once the Health Check is complete, we send our clients a Report of Findings, as well as our recommendations for improvement.
What’s next?
Well, that’s up to you! Some of our clients choose to follow up on any areas detected in-house, while others look to us for ongoing guidance on how to proceed. The beauty of this approach is that it equips businesses with a comprehensive understanding of their compliance landscape that informs the next steps. Having gleaned all of this valuable information through the health check, we then work with our clients to ‘reverse engineer’ a bespoke package that will get them to that end-goal of compliance, and keep them there.
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