The Bayan system in Oman: how a customs declaration works

Every consignment that enters or leaves Oman is declared in Bayan, the electronic system of the Directorate General of Customs. We file in it for our customers, so this guide is written from the working side: who needs an account, how a declaration is created and paid for, what happens after it is submitted, and what can be corrected when something goes wrong. The service pages on the customs website are the final word wherever they differ from anything here.

What Bayan is

Customs launched Bayan in July 2015 and describes it as three systems in one. The first is customs management itself, where declarations are created, assessed and released. The second is the electronic single window: permits and licences from the other government bodies with an interest in the goods are requested through Bayan instead of at separate counters. The third is risk management, which reads the data on each declaration and decides how closely it is checked. The documents behind a declaration, its classification and its value are covered on our customs clearance page.

Who needs an account, and which kind

Bayan has accounts for companies, for individual users and for customs clearance offices, and registration is charged per user.

• A company registers through the customs website with its commercial registration number and the civil ID of the person registering it, or with electronic authentication. Its activities are selected from the company account to match the commercial registration, and the record updates when the registration is renewed.
• Staff work under the company account as individual users. The company's administrator adds each person from user management, gives them a user role and the powers it needs, and chooses whether alerts arrive by email, by phone or both.
• A customs clearance office registers its staff the same way, but each one must be registered in the position of customs clearance officer or broker and have completed the customs clearing course.
• Citizens and residents can register as individual users to declare their own goods, with an ID card activated for electronic authentication, a smartphone SIM with electronic certification, or their ID number.

The declaration: who files it, and with what

Customs defines the declaration as a request submitted to it by the owner of the goods or by someone the owner authorises. The documents it lists are the commercial invoice, the certificate of origin and, where the goods need one, the permit. The steps in Bayan are few: sign in, create the declaration, submit it, pay. What slows a declaration down is rarely the screen. It is a description that will not support a tariff code, a value customs questions, or a permit that should have been requested before the goods were shipped.

Each declaration carries a fee, lower when the goods belong to a private individual than when they belong to a company. The current amounts are on the customs service pages. Duty follows the GCC common external tariff for the goods' code, and value added tax is assessed at import. The tariff file can be downloaded from the customs website to look codes up.

Paying: the payment ticket

Payments in Bayan run through a payment ticket. In the payments section you create a ticket, enter the reference number of the transaction being paid, and fill in the bank's fields. If a payment ticket cannot be added, customs asks you first to check that no debit notice has come from the bank, then to send the ticket number, the document reference and your user details to its technical support.

Green, yellow and red

Once submitted, a declaration is routed by the risk system. Customs describes three channels: green, where the goods are released without customs intervention; yellow, where the documents are checked; and red, where the goods are physically inspected. Nobody chooses the channel. What an importer controls is whether the file gives the risk system anything to stop on: documents that agree with each other and with the bill of lading, a description precise enough to classify, and permits in place before arrival.

Declaring before the ship arrives

Bayan is built so that the declaration, the payment and any permits can be done before the goods reach Oman. The ship's manifest is filed in Bayan by the line's agent before arrival, so there is something to match the declaration against while the vessel is still at sea. Filing early does not release a container at the moment of discharge: the terminal still releases against a delivery order, and an inspection still happens at the port. It moves the questions to the days the ship is sailing, not the days the terminal counts as storage, which our note on demurrage and detention explains.

What the agent files in Bayan

The declaration is not the only filing on a shipment. The line's agent files three documents in Bayan, in this order. Before the ship arrives, the import manifest: the cargo the vessel carries for Oman, which every declaration is matched against. After customs clears the goods, the electronic delivery order, which is what the terminal releases the container against. At Sohar the delivery order comes after clearance, not before, so a declaration that is held also holds the container. And after an outbound vessel sails, the export manifest, which records the cargo it loaded. Where we are the line's agent, we file all three. For our import customers we also file the customs declaration itself, and the export declaration for our export customers, so the declaration, the manifest and the delivery order sit on one file.

Correcting a declaration

A declaration is corrected by request, not by editing it. If the wrong port was selected, customs' guidance is an amendment request where the right port is similar to the one chosen, and a cancellation request where it is not. Either request is approved by the port that was wrongly selected. For wrong contact details on the company, customs' guidance is to update the commercial registration first, then the company's details in the single window.

Filing yourself, or through an agent

An importer with regular shipments and someone in the office who knows the tariff can file in Bayan directly. The case for an agent is the file around the declaration: the query customs raises, the match against the manifest, the delivery order and the terminal. That is why we file our customers' declarations ourselves rather than pass them to an outside broker. We can also take the freight forwarding and the land transport from the terminal on the same file. On sea freight we act as agent, not carrier: you receive the principal's bill of lading, signed by us as agent.

Get a rate: send the cargo, the port and when it will be ready, and say if you only need the clearance.