At the session held on 26th November 2020, the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia has passed a set of customs laws, that is - the Law on Amendments of the Customs Law, as well as the Law on Amendments of the Law on Customs Service. The Law on Amendments of the Customs Law was published in the “Official Gazette of the RS“ No. 144/2020 and became effective eight days after the publication. 

Taking into consideration that the earlier legal formulation of Article 17, paragraph 9 of the Customs Law prescribed that the decisions of a customs authority are executive from the moment of their rendering, which is obviously in contradiction to the General Administrative Procedure Act, changes have been made so that the Article in question now prescribes that the decisions of a customs authority are executive from the day of delivery to the entity the case decision refers to.

The second change of the Law on Amendments of the Customs Law refers to Article 99, where the obsolescence deadlines for customs debt payment have been altered. The earlier legal decision that the customs debt cannot be charged after three years of its incurrence has turned out to be hardly applicable in practice.

Starting from a situation in which the amount of import or export duties payable is not equal to the amount in the declaration, which further implies that the customs authority informs the debtor about the customs debt when it is possible to determine the amount of import or export duties payable and render a decision referring to it. In practice, it turned out that the period of three years for the determination of the customs debt, rendering a decision and informing the debtor about the debt incurred, and simultaneously, for conducting a compulsory debt settlement within the same deadline of three years, is  highly unlikely. 

For this reason and in order to enable the customs authority to conduct all necessary actions for customs debt determination and then to inform the debtor about the debt incurred, and finally, to settle the customs debt, the extension of obsolescence deadlines has been suggested. Consequentially, in accordance with the suggested changes of the article in question, the customs debt cannot be charged after five years of its incurrence.  Moreover, the same article prescribes that the obsolescence period is stopped by any action of the customs authority taken for the sake of charging duties. In this case, the counting of the obsolescence period starts again, but the right to charge becomes obsolete after ten years from the day of debt incurrence.