Jamaica Customs: building our capacity, underpinned by integrity,pride and excellence

This year’s International Customs

Day theme: “Nurturing the Next Generation: Promoting a Culture of Knowledgesharing and Professional Pride in Customs,” comes at a pivotal period in the life of the Jamaica Customs Agency (JCA), with the entity implementing new strategies, transformative initiatives, and having a continuous focus on effectively building the capacity of our human resources.

The theme underpins the critical role human capital plays within Customs administrations and importantly, the importance of building staff capacity, undertaking our work with pride, and executing our mandates with excellence and integrity.

The JCA looks forward to the annual celebration of International Customs Day, coupled with our week of activities, which bring into focus the work, initiatives and achievements of the agency for the current fiscal year.

We stand proudly as a world leading Customs administration cognisant of the strides we have made in modernising our operations and emerging as an active and effective competitor on the global stage.

In a strategic manner, we have further advanced the culture of integrity and professionalism in executing our mandates. As such, we have implemented several programmes and mechanisms to ensure the integrity of our automated systems, processes, and staff and stakeholder interactions, recognising the crucial role we play in advancing JCA’S mandates, and our impact to Jamaica’s economic and national development.

Globally, the processes and services delivered by Customs are changing rapidly to reflect customers evolving expectations in relation to trade and travel. Jamaica Customs has been making tremendous progress to enhance our service delivery and customer experience.

This has been supported by the Agency’s appetite towards continuous improvement, evidenced by the use of automation and digitalisation, while remaining people-oriented and customer-focused. Having experienced the global health pandemic, we have had to re-engineer many of our business processes, embrace new technologies and introduce more customer-focused and staff-centred initiatives, in order to remain resilient and committed to our mandates – that of border protection, trade facilitation and revenue collection.

As part of the agency’s continued thrust in enhancing its operational efficiency, customer service delivery and border protection capabilities, the agency has taken the bold step in piloting its Contactless Clearance Process, to facilitate faster and more efficient clearance.

Our ISO Quality Management journey has seen us successfully completing our ISO 9001:2015 Stage 2 Audit, I am pleased to indicate that this project is quite advanced, and will certainly bring about further transformation as it relates to our quality management system. We are committed to not only maintaining high standards, but in continuously improving them.

In keeping with the Government of Jamaica’s “Get Every Illegal Gun Campaign,” the JCA has been playing an integral role in the process, with the roll-out of our “Tell Us” media campaign which allows people to anonymously share information with Crime Stop, on illegal guns and other contraband coming through our borders. So please, “#TELLUS.”

Another major success for the Agency is the full acceptance of the e-certificate of Origin throughout CARICOM which will further increase the efficiency of trade across borders. There has also been a continuous thrust to engage our staff and external stakeholders, which saw the introduction of the agency’s external Stakeholder Focus Group Sessions. We will continue to execute our engagement strategy during the upcoming fiscal year, and strengthen our internal and external mechanisms, while leveraging our national, regional and international presence and impact.

Embracing excellence is a key component for us, at the JCA, and having been given the responsibility to drive the implementation of the Jamaica Single Window for Trade (JSWIFT), we are seeing the successful results of this project, and will continue to partner with other Border Regulatory Agencies (BRAS) in building out this electronic single window that has been improving cross-border trade.

The agency continues to play a pivotal role in Jamaica’s development. Therefore, we will continue to provide the fuel for the growth and acceleration of all industries, take steps to encourage compliance and enforce where necessary, engage our various stakeholders, improve service delivery towards achieving greater efficiency, and upholding the tenets of our Core Values – Customer-focused, Accountability, Professionalism, Integrity and Transparency.

I thank all our partners and stakeholders for your support, and look forward to your continued involvement in our various initiatives.

I also take this opportunity to commend my committed and resilient Customs team. Let us continue to execute our mandates with pride, integrity,professionalism and excellence.

Mrs. Velma Ricketts Walker, JP Ceo/commissioner of Customs