Thirty customs officers from Fiji, Palau, Papua New Guinea (PNG), Samoa, Solomon Islands, Timor Leste, Tonga and Vanuatu recently completed preliminary training to become master trainers on Risk Management (RM) and Post Clearance Audit (PCA) held at the Fiji Revenue and Customs Service (FRCS) Headquarters in Suva last week.

The workshop on the first Working Group Activity (WG1) of the Master Trainer Programme (MTP) on Risk Management (RM) and Post Clearance Audit (PCA) is being organized by the World Customs Organisation (WCO) in cooperation with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

MTP is the flagship program of the WCO/JICA Joint Project and is aimed at working with customs administrations to build more sustainable training capacity on key customs topics through the development of a pool of highly experienced trainers, tailor-made training materials and training programme/course curricula.

FRCS’ chief executive officer Udit Singh said the MTP is important for Fiji as well as other Pacific Island countries as it will help develop the skills and capacity of customs professionals which can help to enhance revenue collection, support economic development, build regional cooperation and improve border security.

FRCS director Border and Customs Shelini Kumar said the MTP represented a critical step forward in enhancing expertise and broadening capacity to manage the increasing complexities of customs and border management.

“Our collective goal is to build a resilient customs service that can meet the demands of a rapidly changing global landscape,” Ms Kumar said.

JICA has been implementing MTP with WCO since 2016. In the Pacific, the first MTP which was on the Customs Valuation and the Harmonised System (HS) classification was implemented from 2021 to June 2024 targeting six countries and resulting in 21 Master Trainers.