Recently, the Customs Department has received feedback from several associations, enterprises, and press agencies regarding the declaration of chemical ingredients during import procedures.

Responding to feedback from businesses under the US-ASEAN Business Council (USABC), a representative from the Customs Department stated that there is currently no regulation mandating a detailed declaration of 100% of chemical ingredients in all cases.

Customs procedures for imported and exported chemicals are currently executed synchronously based on customs laws and chemical regulations. This legal framework is specifically stipulated in the Law on Customs 2014, Decree No. 08/2015/NĐ-CP as amended and supplemented by Decree No. 167/2025/NĐ-CP, alongside the Law on Chemicals 2025 and its guiding decrees, namely Decree No. 24/2026/NĐ-CP and Decree No. 26/2026/NĐ-CP.

“Since these new documents took effect, the customs authority has not issued any additional separate guiding documents that would generate further procedures. All specialized inspection and supervision activities are run seamlessly under risk management principles to facilitate maximum convenience for law-abiding business communities,” the Customs Department representative affirmed on May 19.

Regarding the obligation to declare and provide documentation, customs declarants follow general regulations and are not required to submit additional documents beyond the standardized customs dossier. However, according to the Customs Department, based on the information criteria in Circular No. 121/2025/TT-BTC, enterprises are responsible for clearly describing the goods' name, ingredients, content, and physicochemical properties on the declaration form to serve as a basis for tax code determination and the application of specialized management policies.

According to the Customs Department, for declarations falling into the Yellow and Red lanes, if information is found to be inaccurate, incomplete, or inappropriate during document reviews or physical inspections, Customs officers hold the right to request the declarant to provide supplementary technical documents under the provisions of the Law on Customs.

The measure of requesting clarification on ingredients and content is applied in cases where the dossier fails to clearly show the composition, leaving insufficient grounds for cross-checking against the lists of banned chemicals, conditional chemicals, or those requiring special control.

Due to the highly specialized nature of chemicals, determining clear concentration levels is mandatory for the customs authority to have a basis for applying exemption thresholds for Licenses or Certificates under specialized regulations, such as content limit thresholds below 0.1%, 1%, or 5%. In cases where the supplementary documents from the enterprise still lack a sufficient legal basis to accurately identify the nature of the goods, the customs authority will then proceed with analysis, classification, or solicitation of expert assessment to form a basis for issuing customs clearance decisions.

To minimize delays, the customs authority requested USABC to cooperate in stepping up dissemination, encouraging enterprises to proactively declare full technical criteria from the very beginning. Regarding businesses' concerns over the risk of commercial secret leaks, the regulatory body referred directly to the Law on Chemicals 2025 to clarify the scope of information confidentiality.

Accordingly, fundamental identification data found on the Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS/SDS)—including the CAS number, UN number, purity of the chemical mixture, as well as the hazard level of additives or impurities—are public information and completely fall outside the scope of confidentiality.

The customs authority's request for this identification information to serve state management tasks is within its authority and does not violate the manufacturer's trade secret protection principles. Reality has recorded that shipments featuring clear information-sharing cooperation from enterprises are all processed for rapid customs clearance.

Simultaneously, to unify the actual implementation process, the Customs Department has proactively aggregated arising bottlenecks to propose that the Vietnam Chemicals Agency under the Ministry of Industry and Trade soon provide official feedback, serving as a basis for uniform guidance across border-gate units in the coming time.

Source: Bao Tin tuc va Dan toc - TTXVN