Elaboration of a digital document for foreign trade in Belarus

Work is in progress in Belarus to develop a universal digital document for foreign trade operations. According to the Foreign Ministry, the creation of a universal state-run web portal for foreign trade operations will be one of the most important events that will allow considerably improving Belarus’ foreign trade rankings in the Doing Business report in the future. Many countries are working on it or have accomplished it. The reform has been hailed by World Bank experts and has resulted in a massive improvement of the rankings of those countries. Work is now in progress to agree the main parameters, the concept of the project and its future guidelines with interested parties because the project is extremely complicated in its methodological and technical aspects.

Work is in progress to design a universal digital document for foreign trade operations. The document will be able to replace a considerable number of mandatory documents, which influence Belarus’ rankings now. The new digital document will allow economic operators to spend less on foreign trade operations since they will no longer have to submit an abundant number of hardcopy documents to various auditing agencies, spending a lot of resources preparing these documents. Apart from that, the document will reduce the time spent on interaction with auditing agencies.

Belarus is working to harmonize technical requirements with requirements of trade partner states for the sake of facilitating several procedural aspects as far as the preparation of documents that accompany cargoes is concerned.