ESPO Paper on the implementation of the Reporting Formalities Directive
2 February 2017
- Introduction
The Commission and industry stakeholders agree that the implementation of the Reporting Formalities Directive – 2010/65/EU (hereafter RFD)as it currently stands, hasn’t achieved its aim, that of significantly reducing administrative burden. In this context, the Commission launched in spring 2016 the REFIT evaluation on both the RFD and the Vessel Traffic Monitoring & Information Systems Directive (hereafter VTMIS). The evaluation report is expected to be ready in May/June 2017. This will then be followed by an impact assessment and possibly a proposal for revision of the RFD, which could then introduce new provisions with a view to achieve further trade facilitation.
In order to refresh our knowledge as well as to prepare for the possible revision of the RFD, this short paper intends to provide a description of the level of implementation of the RFD up to date and lay out current challenges and initiatives under development.
In essence, the RFD is a horizontal facilitation directive, which does not introduce new reporting obligations but instead aims to reduce reporting burden from the existing information requirements. The RFD has the following principal objectives:
- Simplification and harmonisation of reporting formalities
- Development of National Single Windows
- Reporting data only once
Each chapter in this paper will be devoted to the level of implementation of the abovementioned objectives, followed by a final chapter that will outline the possible way forward for ESPO.
- Simplification and harmonisation of reporting formalities
Under the RFD each Member State is since 1 June 2015 obliged to take measures to ensure that the reporting formalities are requested in a harmonised and coordinated manner. The reporting formalities, defined in the RFD, which are required when a ship calls a port for administrative and procedural purposes are determined by EU, international and national law:
- Reporting formalities resulting from legal acts of the Union
This category of reporting formalities includes the information which shall be provided in accordance with the following provisions:
1.Notification for ships arriving in and departing from ports of the Member States
2.Border checks on persons
3.Notification of dangerous or polluting goods carried on board
4.Notification of waste and residues
5.Notification of security information
6.Entry summary declaration / This category of reporting formalities includes the information which shall be provided in accordance with the FAL Convention[1] and other relevant international legal instruments.
1. FAL form 1: General Declaration
2. FAL form 2: Cargo Declaration
3. FAL form 3: Ship’s Stores Declaration
4. FAL form 4: Crew’s Effects Declaration
5. FAL form 5: Crew List
6. FAL form 6: Passenger List
7. FAL form 7: Dangerous Goods
8. Maritime Declaration of Health / Member States may include in this category the information which shall be provided in accordance with their national legislation.
The RFD is however not covering all reporting formalities. Some port data requirements which do have a legal basis in EU, international and national legislation, are not included in the scope of the RFD. This includes for example customs and cargo data or Eurostat requirements. This is one of the main weaknesses of the RFD according to the shipping industry.
On the other hand, there is also another category of essential port data requirements which do not find any legal basis in EU, international and national legislation. These data requirements are thus port specific in nature and include for example certain data required for operational purposes (e.g. draught, data on ice, locks, etc.). These data requirements may be excluded from the NSW.
During the RFD implementation process, the data requirements were assessed with a view to harmonisationin the eMS expert group[2] for the data required by EU and international law (A and B). A final data set was proposed but not all Member States approved the eMS outcome. In addition, the harmonisation of cargo information did not take place due to disagreements between customs and maritime authorities at various levels.
Furthermore, the eMS group decided not to deal with the harmonisation of national reporting requirements (C). The harmonisation of those were left to the Member States to achieve since it would have been a very challenging and time consuming exercise for the eMS group. In some countries however, port call reporting requirements and formats have been harmonised at Member State level (e.g. Germany, Ireland, Spain, etc.).
The current degree of harmonisation of the reporting formalities mentioned in Annex I of the RFD (A – EU ; B – IMO; C – National) at European level can be summarised as follows:
Harmonisedat EU level / Harmonised at
MS level / Electronic submission / Submission through NSW
A / No / No / Yes / Yes
B / Yes / Yes / Yes / Yes
C / No / In some Member states / Yes / Not mandatory
ESPO believes that port specific data requirements should be assessedon their necessity, simplified when possible, and harmonised and that any variations across ports should be kept ideally at a minimum. Any additional data requirements should be justified in terms of necessity and added value.
This would avoid that shipping industry needs to submit the same data in slightly different formats in each port. ESPO could be pro-active in exploring the feasibility to harmonise ports’ data requirements and formats across EU ports.
- Development of National Single Windows
One of the main objectivesof the RFD is theestablishment of National Single Windows (hereafter NSW) by the Member States asfrom 1st June 2015, to which the data has to be sent electronically, while paper reporting is no longer accepted.
NSW should connectall national authorities dealing with ship calls (maritime, port, customs, border controls, security, environment and health), to which the data has to be reported. The RFD makes it mandatory to harmonise reporting within a Member Stateand connect their NSW’s to the SafeSeaNet (hereafter SSN)aiming to share the relevant information with other Member States.
To sum up, under the RFD the national single window performs two main functions:
-Collect information from the shipping lines or representatives(“interface function”);
-Make available the received information to any competent and relevant national authority, as well as to the SSN system for sharing of relevant information between Member States (“gateway function”).
Currently, althoughNSWs are in place and functioning in most Member States, many of them indicate that certain formalities or functionalities still need to be added to their systems.
The figure on the next page shows the different architectures of the NSW’s implemented among Member States. In Member State A, the NSW performs both functions of interface and gateway; in Member State B, the Port Community Systems(hereafter PCS) act as interfaces and share the gateway function with the NSW.
It should be noted that some authorities in a Member State concerned by the RFD have or are developing their own single windows (TRACES for phytosanitary authorities, Customs single windows, etc.). How these SW’s are linked with the Maritime NSW is left to the Member States and the issue has not been addressed by DG Move since it is in the remit of other DG’s (DG SANCO, DG TAXUD, etc.).
During the implementation process of RFD, ESPO argued in favour of the inclusion of existing Port Community Systems as entry points to the NSWs. In the case of existing and well-functioning PCS (with significant investment by the ports),ports do not see the reason for changing a successful system. In addition, a central system may not be suitable for all governance and governmental structures existing in Europe.This was accepted in the eMS expert group and as a result, different architectures of the NSWs were implemented in Europe (Centralised NSW vs Multi-entry NSW).
On the other hand, ports are oftenreluctant to get essential operational information from a centralised system. The main reasons for this relate to the potentially lower quality and reliability of centrally provided data and to the risk of losing efficiency, flexibility, interaction with the ships’ representatives and control which ports have established for their businesses. However, as the cases of e.g. Ireland, Portugal, Sweden or Finland demonstrate, getting data for operational purposes through a central system can function.
The World Shipping Council and the European Community Shipowners’ Association (shipping industry associations) often raise criticismon those Member States where the NSW integrates multiple entry points (i.e. integrates the PCS or similar systems; e.g. Germany, Spain, France, UK, Netherlands, etc.). Their main point of criticism is the non-harmonised nature of PCS’s across Europe. The shipping lines are calling for afully harmonized ‘interface’ so that they will be able to submit the data requested in the same way and format across the EU.
Theshipping lines are also unhappy when the NSW developed has only a web interface and does not allow machine-to-machine transfer of datasince it is notconsidered efficient for container shipping lines given the amount of data to be submitted.
- Reporting data only once
Under the RFD, Member States were expected to re-use the information put into the system (the ‘reporting only once’ principle), in order to reduce the administrative burden for the shipping industry. In this case, data used by different authorities in a Member State would be submitted only once and shared by the relevant authorities and vessels calling in successive Member States would not need to reintroduce the same data in everyNSW’s.
However, the ‘reporting only once’ objective has not currently beenachieved. Shipping lineshave expressed their frustration as they find it difficult to understand why a ship that has reported to one EU port also needs to report the same data to another port (sometimes in different formats). ESPO argues that in practice, calling at a port will always require a certain level of reporting as different ports may require additional information, certain things change between port calls and the new data needs to be reported again (e.g. cargo, dangerous cargo, draft, passenger list, etc.).
In general, the sharing and re-use of information between all different authorities at national level and between Member States is not yet solved. In principle, the NSW’s should be achieving this at Member State level with the exception of the cargo information linked to customs reporting,where no agreementhas been found yet. The Commission considers that the aim of SSNis to link the NSW’s and enable the sharing and re-use of data between Member States.
ESPO shares the vision of reporting only once and of sharing and re-using data by relevant authorities where possible. However, ESPO considers that this requires the agreement and full commitment of all competent authorities (maritime, customs, health, ports, etc.)
- E-manifest pilot project
In the meanwhile, the Commission has initiated a project called the eManifest pilot project, which aims to agree on a harmonised electronic manifest through which the shipping industry can test the reporting of cargo data (for customs and maritime formalities) in an integrated way with the other RFD additional formalities through a European Maritime Single Window (hereafter EMSW). In this way, it would be proved that the reporting only once principle can be achieved and that Member States can share and re-use the data through SSN (in particular maritime and customs authorities in and across Member States).
This pilot project supported by DG Move and DG Taxud has two concrete objectives:
-First, the project will define the maximum amount of data that can be requested by authorities and the message standard for cargo reporting, to cover maritime and customs authorities formalities.
-In addition, it will test how a European Maritime Single Window (EMSW) could function in practice. For that purpose, EMSA is developing a prototype on the basis of the EMSA NSW prototype to be used for the test.
A number of Member States and industry representatives (among which ESPO and ECSA) are participating in the project definition (business rules definition) and testing of processes.
The results of the pilot project will be taken into account for the way forward on the RFD. In this respect, it should be noted that the Commission recently published a vision paper on anEMSW. The way of thinking of the Commission is that despite any national systems and arrangements that might be in place for reporting formalities, all Member States should also be accepting reporting through this foreseen central EMSW system. However, there is no obligation to report through the central EMSW system (there is no legal basis for this), and thus should be seen as an extra option next to the NSW’s.
- Quo vadis?
ESPO agrees with the Commission that the implementation of the Reporting Formalities Directive as it stands, does not achieve its main aim, that of reducing administrative burden and promoting trade facilitation.
ESPO therefore sees the ongoing REFIT evaluation of both the RFD and VTMIS as the perfect opportunity to analyse the reasons why the RFD is not properly implemented and therefore not achieves its aim. In this context, ESPO published in June 2016 its ‘Road Map for Maritime Trade Facilitation’, where it outlined its vision to achieve the aim of maritime trade facilitation.[3]
The Commission’s evaluation report is expected to be ready in May/June 2017, which will then be followed by an impact assessment and might possibly lead to a proposal for revision of the RFD.However, this process will take a significant amount of time and therefore the Commission thinks that in the meantime many of the identified problems could be already solved, through further cooperation in the High Level Steering Group for Governance of the Digital Maritime System and Services (HLSG) and voluntary adoption of proposed measures.
The first relevant meetings of the HLSG to come are on 9 February (subgroup on E-manifest) and 10 February (subgroup on Single Window). The ESPO secretariat together with port experts will attend those meetings.
In order to make sure the point of view of port authorities is taken into account, both in the evaluation and possible revision process of the RFD as well as in the HLSG of the Digital Maritime System and Services, it will be necessary to keep our position up to date and thus also consider a possible update of the ESPO Road Map for Maritime Trade Facilitation.There is definitely a need to work further on some issues such as for example the scope of the ‘reporting only once’ principle or the challenges for the realisation of the EMSW.The Trade Facilitation, Customs and Security Committee will be coordinating this file, whereas the Marine Affairs Committee will be offering support.
LS / 2February 2017
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[1] The FAL Convention (or “Convention on Facilitation of International Maritime Traffic”) is an international agreement adopted by members of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in 1965 and has been amended 13 times ever since. The purpose of the Convention is to facilitate maritime transport by reducing paper work, simplifying formalities, documentary requirements and procedures associated with the arrival, stay and departure of ships engaged in international voyages.
[2]The eMS group or “Expert group on Maritime administrative simplification and electronic services”, was a group created by the European Commission composed of representatives from the Commission, member state authorities and industry stakeholders. The group assisted the Commission in the implementation of the Reporting Formalities Directive and in preparation of the EU e-Maritime services. The group has been dissolved and replaced by the High Level Steering Group for Governance of the Digital Maritime System and Services.
[3]The ESPO Road Map for Maritime Trade Facilitation can be consulted via the following link: