The priority areas of cooperation are reflected in EUCAB’s national expert networks. The common objective of the cooperation in these areas is to ensure access to best practices and a level-playing field for all Member States’ customs administrations.
Risk management is essential for identifying, assessing and managing potential threats, enabling organizations to ensure compliance and achieve their objectives.
As the customs workload increases and human resources decrease, risk management is of utmost importance for customs administrations. EUCAB aims at developing a common understanding and an integrated approach across Member States’ customs administrations regarding risk analysis. The overall goal is to promote a shared vision of risk management principles and objectives, and improve customs risk management at the EU level, contributing to security, safety, and financial risk mitigation, including the sanctions regimes. Taking into consideration that risk factors and risk management reflect the specificities of different borders and contexts, focus areas include identifying main risk factors and provide recommendations for creating risk profiles, strengthen high-quality data sharing of risk information by aligning the communication channels used to transfer risk-related data, foster the smart use of technological innovations such as self-learning algorithms to fight ever-increasing volumes of legal and illegal goods arriving in the EU.
Procurement is essential to any organization’s efficiency, performance, and value creation, ensuring the quality, reliability and cost-efficiency of supplies.
EUCAB will favour sharing common challenges, mapping good practices, and disseminating recommendations on procurement procedures. Discussions on specific devices and technical specifications will help develop innovative solutions, in compliance with the current relevant national and European legislation (tender and procurement). Cooperation in this field starts with creating a catalogue of equipment currently used by Member States’ customs administrations, and establishing minimum requirements on customs control equipment allowing to secure the EU borders and on the safety measures of the customs officers assigned to their use and maintenance. Furthermore, a platform for sharing upcoming tender procedures will be established, as well as a database for field tests before the tender procedure, with a focus on non-intrusive devices (including scans), drones (unmanned aerial vehicles and underwater drones), sniffer dogs (K9s), Closed Circuit Television, IT equipment for field use.
Resilience and integrity are strategic priorities for any organization, playing a central role in shaping a culture of transparency, professionalism, and trust.
EUCAB aims to map current national initiatives and identify trends and gaps to support Member States in building resilient, integrity-driven, and inclusive customs services. It focuses on developing and sharing anti-corruption measures, codes of conduct, and accountability tools; fostering collective learning from real life events (e.g. pandemics, sanctions control, migration pressures, and cyber risks) to improve response capacities; promoting HR strategies that reinforce integrity and build trust, and respectful workplaces that strengthen resilience by enhancing motivation and ethical behaviour. Resilience and integrity initiatives are tackled in cooperation with customs’ public and private partners.
Innovation plays a key role in ensuring the relevance of organizations in a complex, competitive, and evolving environment. Innovation in the field of customs control is necessary to meet critical challenges and enhance customs’ resilience.
EUCAB pulls together the innovation initiatives and resources of the Member States in different areas such as image recognition and the use of AI, smart seals and smart containers, development of non-intrusive inspection technologies, software solutions and control applications for mobile devices, etc. It focuses on mapping existing relevant innovation initiatives within customs administrations (in particular, programs related to innovation in non-intrusive inspection technologies, risk analysis, IT devices and software), and developing common innovation initiatives.
Training is a critical investment in customs’ success and their capacity to adapt to ever-changing challenges. Cooperation in the area of training is a major lever to increase the quality of skills acquisition across the EU customs. Fostering collaboration across national and regional levels, ensuring continuous improvement of training programs, enhancing the professional skills of customs officers should lead to more efficient and effective customs operations. By sharing best practices, coordinating training curricula and mutualizing training facilities (training centers), EUCAB promotes a cost-efficient training and more harmonized operational procedures in comparable circumstances, ensuring a level playing field for customs operations.
Focus areas in training:
- Identification of training gaps and needs of Member States.
- Mapping the training curricula of Member States, and supporting the development of specific training materials.
- Listing trainers available for trainings.
- Listing training facilities of Member States available for cooperation, including train-the-trainer-programs.
- Gathering and spreading information and best practices in learning and development, thus improving the quality of training.
- Organizing specialized training to meet training needs, thus strengthening customs administrations’ joint involvement in the training area.
- Developing Centers of Excellence for customs training at the EU level.
- Developing, based on the mapping exercises, of a training cooperation program, taking into consideration the existing programs.
Cooperation is essential to ensure the success of projects by fostering trust, sharing responsibility and mobilizing diverse skills, thereby increasing innovation and creativity and optimizing resources.
By mapping existing, planned and potential national and EU customs cooperation projects with third countries, EUCAB helps streamline efforts on cooperation activities. It contributes to better understand Member States’ support needs in this field; identify thematic priorities and regional focuses; develop a shared EU-level view of customs cooperation with third countries. The findings should allow for better strategic alignment of EU and national resources, enhanced synergies among Member States’ initiatives, and more effective support for future programming with third countries.
Clear, structured and relevant communication is essential to ensure transparency, strengthen engagement, foster collaboration and understanding, thus helping to achieve an organization’s objectives.
Communication for EUCAB aims to facilitate cooperation while also enhancing visibility for EUCAB’s achievements and, more generally, for customs’ role and impact. It focuses on shaping coordinated and impactful messaging on EU customs initiatives. It helps improve the quality and efficiency of the flow of information among the customs administrations of the Member States. It brings together professionals to share experiences and best practices, and put the top developments in the field at the service of customs’ success.
