The Wise Persons Group (WPG), an independent high-level group comprised of members from politics, industry, trade and academia, recently issued a report analyzing, on request of the European Commission, the challenges that EU Customs currently face, by examining current rules, procedures and governance and advising on how these can be improved. Their recommendations will feed into the customs reform package, which the Commission will present by the end of this year.

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Trading across borders is a notoriously complex process and highly dependent on paper documents, in spite of decades long efforts to digitalise. A cross-border transaction involves multiple actors and on average requires the exchange of 36 documents and 240 copies. However, currently, less than one percent of trade documents are fully digitised. Although the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated digitalisation, the lack of adoption of data standards and of a common format for data exchange significantly hinders the seamless data flow from one end of the supply chain to the other. Standards adoption also remains limited in large part due to the complexity and fragmentation of the standards landscape.

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