Swedish single eApplication for exports

Swedish Board of Agriculture and Swedish Customs have joint responsibilities to manage export-refunds in Sweden and hence share a process. Swedish Customs performs on assignment by the Board of Agriculture documentary- and physical checks on exports on foodstuff eligible to export-refund according to the Common Agriculture Policy. Since the implementation in 1995 (Swedish EU-accession), the process has been paper-based, meaning that customers were forced to submit information on three different occasions. Through AX information is submitted electronically and also at one occasion to both public services, creating a simpler process, higher quality and increased customer-service. The primary stakeholders are Swedish companies dealing with foreign trade of foodstuff eligible to export-refunds. The necessary information is exchanged electronically between Swedish Customs and the Board of Agriculture further improving quality and decreasing lead-times. Simultaneously the public services can increase internal efficiency. The increase in quality generated by AX means that Sweden runs less risks of making mistakes when granting export-refunds and hence to steer clear of possible economic sanctions from the European Commission.

Main results, benefits and impacts

Main indicators of impact and results are the outreach of service provision and the effects achieved for agencies and other users: Outreach: National As all companies applying for export refunds have the possibility to use the online AX, the outreach is 100%. Currently approximately 30% of all export refund applications use the AX-application. Effects: Swedish Customs estimates time spent on documentary- and physical checks on export-refund commodities has been decreased by 50% while the Board of Agriculture estimates time-saving of 40% in the process of refund-payments. ?Danisco Sugar appreciates the possibility to use joint electronic processes for export-declarations and applications for export-refunds. It means more efficiency and increased security to us.? Ms Gunilla Svensson, Danisco Sugar AB

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Lessons learnt

The learning points are indicated by the innovative issues of the case: The very innovative part is actually not really new but very efficient. The two existing authorities have only been "combined" by a common single interface for the provision of e-services. The two responsible authorities which belong to two different Ministerial departments (Boards) sat together negotiating and agreeing on common syntaxes and datasets for the application of export refund processes. They are now able not only to offer a commonly used eExport-declaration form for companies, but also to remain the possibility to directly integrate the user data of the forms into their legacy systems. To make this possible, i.e. to reduce the office visits and to reduce the necessary documents from 5 to 1, fields and data in these forms had to be identified. Then they traced back to the legislation and the need for each information part. Efforts were made to combine and reduce the number of data needed. Transferability limits of the case: This case can be reproduced in the same area in another county but also within other fields of government service. What they have done was to create a common single interface to two existing authorities. From the interoperability point of view beside the technical issues, specific syntactics and semantics certainly have to be defined for other services and domains from scratch or at least had to be adapted to a certain extend. The most important part is the organisational issues, i.e. the way they did it by re-thinking the existing processes and to collaborate though the adherence to different government departments.