By Musa O. Bah
Gambia Revenue Authority (GRA) has extended risk management training to some government institutions which include GPA, SIS, Food Safety, and GRA among others,
The two-week risk management training kicked start on Wednesday and was funded by French Agency with technical experts from the UK.
Presiding over the official opening of the training, the GRA Commissioner General Yankuba Darboe explained that customs authorities are responsible for the implementation of a broad range of government policies in the area as diverse as revenue collection, trade, and traveler compliance, protection of society, cultural heritage, intellectual property, collection of statistics and environmental protection, through the maintenance of control over cross border movement of goods, people, and conveyances.
According to him, in The Gambia, risk management is basically on two principles, the changing customs operational environment and the need to adopt it compliance management risk base approach in customs operations.
In addition to this maintenance of control, he said, customs authorities have the mandates to provide an appropriate level of facilitation to trade and travel in a way that reduces the impact of the intervention.
He went further that this change in the operating environment has meant that the Authority needs to keep the amount of intervention to the minimum necessary to achieve policy outcomes. And also ensure that regularities requirements (red tape) are not unduly overly prescriptive.
He added that in pursuit of achieving a balance between intervention and facilitation has been seen as a “Zero –Sum” game where an increase in one would necessarily imply a decrease in the other.
CG Darboe noted that the background of risk management in customs administration evolve as a result of the changing customs operating environment, and the need to adopt a compliance management Risk base approach to customs operations.
