Interactive governance

With a view to impeding the logistic process as little as possible, the Netherlands follows a 'Coordinated Border Management’ approach. This centres on two principles: the Single Window and the One-Stop Shop. The Single Window is aimed at ensuring that information for border processing for various different government agencies is provided only once, is then processed by several authorities, with one decision sent back to the business community. In the case of the One-Stop Shop, all agencies responsible for supervising the movement of goods across the EU's external borders make agreements so that checks are carried out at the same time and in the same place as much as possible. Dutch Customs work closely with the Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA) and the Human Environment and Transport Inspectorate (ILT) for this.

In the Union Customs Code and the General Customs Act, Dutch Customs are designated as the service responsible for coordination and cargo management. So, for example, Coordinated Border Management at ports is implemented by using a cargo management strategy with three attributes:

• joint risk selection, with Dutch Customs selecting inspections for other agencies
• one single process for planning and coordinating checks
• joint performance of checks.