The purpose of the TATIScms Tariff Management module is to ensure that the provision of tariff data, based on a legal text spread across diverse government agencies, facilitates trading while maintaining legal compliance. It is a simple matter for a government agency to have a law promulgated which places full liability for incorrect tariff data used in a goods declaration squarely in the court of the submitting trader. On the face of it this seems reasonable, but what if the data required is contained in a multitude of legal documents spread across diverse government agencies without guaranteed consistency? This is the highly undesirable reality for the trader community as well as the customs organisation if there are no solutions in place to support legal compliance. The TATIScms Tariff Management module will provide the following three indispensable functions to Customs organizations and traders:

·           A Tariff database that contains all historical and current tariff data. This database contains all the data of the WCO harmonized system to subheading level, augmented with the country specific commodity codes, anti-dumping, countervailing, prohibitions and restrictions, permit and license requirements. This information is gathered from various government organizations and integrated into a single database

·           A Tariff lookup and Tariff calculator function that can be deployed in two distinct environments, namely as web services to traders as well as embedded in the TATIScms solution as the tariff calculator and “legal compliance verifier”

·           A management system to manage the administration of Tariff data according to legal and other government requirements, the promulgation of the tariff data in a country’s legal framework and the distribution of tariff data to other government agencies and traders

The key driver for the TATIScms Tariff Management module is to ensure legal compliance to answer questions like – Did the trader provide all the necessary permits for the import, export or transit declaration? Is the VAT calculation correct (is the VAT at all declared)? What about all the other environmental levies? Were they considered correctly? Which other government agency should be involved during post clearance inspections?