SUMMARY OF THE TRANS-EUROPEAN COORDINATION MEETING

We would like to inform you about the results of the Trans-European Coordination Meeting organized by the European Commission (COM), which was dedicated to practical issues of implementation and stability of the ICS2 system (Release 2 and Release 3).
Since effective interaction with this IT import control system directly affects the speed of clearance and transit of goods at the EU borders, we kindly ask you to take into account the following operational changes and recommendations:
1. Business Continuity Plan (BCP) mode:
o Automatic start: If the central or national components of the ICS2 system become unavailable and the technical problem cannot be resolved within 30 minutes, the Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is automatically activated. An official notification is sent about this, after which special (backup) customs procedures come into effect.
o Actions after system recovery: As soon as ICS2 is back up and running, economic operators (EOs) are required to submit all ENS that failed to be submitted during the technical failure.
o Important: ENS declarations that were already successfully submitted before the failure cannot be duplicated or modified.
o Slowdown is not a failure: If the system is slow and replies to messages are delayed, this is considered a performance degradation and not a complete system unavailability. In such cases, ENS submissions should continue as normal. Do not duplicate or resubmit messages just because a reply has not yet been received.
2. Planned improvements to monitoring (MON&BS): The European Commission has confirmed that businesses and IT service providers will soon be able to access the Monitoring and Business Statistics Tool (MON&BS). This will allow forwarders to see the status of the system in real time, quickly learn about failures and independently record technical problems that will trigger the BCP procedure.
3. Difficulties with national instructions of EU member states: Currently, there is a problem with the availability of local BCP instructions in English (often national customs authorities publish them only in state languages). The creation of a single central repository of documents on the CIRCABC platform is being discussed. Until its creation, we recommend that Ukrainian forwarders coordinate in advance the procedure for actions in case of failures directly with European partners and counterparties in specific countries of clearance.
4. Discipline when registering technical errors (tickets): The European Commission calls for strict discipline when reporting technical incidents. If errors occur during the submission of ENS, it is necessary to:
o Conduct a basic check of technical error codes on your side;
o Provide the incident registration number and supporting evidence (e.g. system logs) when escalating the issue.
Given that there is usually a large backlog of unprocessed ENS declarations after systems are restored, please allow for possible temporary delays in supply chains even after the system status changes to “available”.
The Association continues to monitor updates and developments in the ICS2 architecture. The next coordination meeting is scheduled for the fall.