Certificate of origin, a legal document that certifies the country of origin of imported or exported goods, is an essential for goods delivery, payment, and claim between trading parties, and for customs clearance, and tariff collection in import countries. In order to further optimize business climate, the General Administration of Customs has planned a major reform of issuance of certificates of origin. Beginning on December 10, the system of intelligent verification of certificates of origin is fully deployed to promote intelligent, standardized and regulated practices.

　　Intelligent verification refers to automatic review of information declared in a certificate of origin by the intelligent verification system based on the principle of risk analysis, big data of certificate of origin issuance, prescribed review rules, and established intelligent review database. In the past, the verification was manually performed by customs staff, and the average waiting time for each certificate was 0.5 working days. With the intelligent system, the efficiency of verification and approval will be greatly improved, and certificates of origin that are accurate and compliant can pass the system “in a second”. What benefits companies even more is that the system enables continuous verification of certificates of origin, all-weather, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

　　The system is applicable to 16 types of certificates of origin: certificates under China-ASEAN, China-Chile, China-Pakistan, China-New Zealand, China-Singapore, China-Peru, China-Costa Rica, China-Iceland, China-Switzerland, China-Australia, China-Korea, China-Georgia free trade agreements, ECFA, and Asia-Pacific Trade Agreement, non-preferential certificates of origin, and GSP certificates of origin.

　　In order to help enterprises make full use of the preferential policies on country of origin and to achieve the goals of stabilizing foreign trade and promoting growth, Huadu Customs has been rolling out a number of facilitation measures to speed up processing of certificates of origin and reduce burden of enterprises, including electronic enterprise record filing, paperless verification of certificates of origin, and self-service certificate printing. A total of 8,145 export certificates of origin have been issued by Huadu Customs from January to November this year, with a value of US$344 million, which helped exporters save about RMB 150 million in overseas tariff.