Distant Upgrade of the Customs Valuation Module of Mongolian Customs

The primary objectives of the consultancy were to finalize the BPI-supported Customs Valuation Module, incorporating recommendations for improvement identified by the Customs General Administration (CGA) IT department and BPI risk management consultant Jorge Montoya. The consultancy involved working with the CGA IT department and Jorge Montoya to clearly identify CGA recommendations for improvement of the Customs Valuation Module. Changes were made to the Customs Valuation System to incorporate identified recommendations, and the improvements were validated to ensure they were working properly. An installation manual for the valuation module was also created. One of the key challenges encountered during the consultancy was the correct display of Cyrillic symbols in the customs valuation module. Extensive investigations were conducted to identify the required configuration for the database, application server, and programming utilities to correctly display Cyrillic symbols. Automatic translation of the description of goods was also implemented, using Google Translate to translate text from Mongolian into other languages. Several issues were identified and addressed during the consultancy. These included the lack of essential fields for customs valuation analysis, the unit price plotted on the valuation graph being dependent on the customs valuation methods, and the valuation module only being loaded with two months' worth of data. The consultancy team successfully migrated the valuation module to Oracle, updated the reporting section, and reprogrammed queries to the database. The customs valuation module has an administrative section and a reporting section. The administrative section was left in MySQL, while the reporting section was migrated to Oracle. This required substantial code changes to the trade data reports functionality and the studies based on HS code functionality of the customs valuation module. The consultancy team also addressed several additional requests to improve administrator's tasks, including changing accessibility to different fields for internal and public users, adding options for selecting or unselecting various fields for graphs and analyses, and reporting summary information on all data. The modified version of the module was presented to 18 customs officials on January 30, 2015. The customs valuation module is now upgraded, tested, and finalized. The next steps involve populating the offense and stamp data to further enhance the module's functionality.