Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Mallett
Well of course the systems are in pace. Arriving at many non EU countries, you can still use the E gates or they just swipe your passport at the desk. No more stamping.
The same applies to goods arriving at non EU ports. The only time there are difficties is when a customs/VAT regime is put in place and the local customs people suddenly lose a profit stream.
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I once, with a colleague, undertook a consultancy exercise for a Dutch company that had just made a deal to buy a subsidiary (a quite large subsidiary in terms of turnover and much larger than the company buying it) of a large German company.
The German company had multiple IT systems designed an implemented to suit its internal accounting structure rather than it operational function.
Somewhat like the EU's internal structure one suspects.
The Dutch company was, as part of the deal, allowed access to the IT people in the seller's operation for 6 months to extract information related to clients, order, invoices, payments, etc. But they had to ask specifically for what they needed. Which of course they did not know since they were working with the sketchiest overview of what was where scattered amongst the system.
Plus the Dutch seemed to have little idea about what they were doing.
We started interviewing their people at around 9am on the first day and by 10am were listening to the third set of interviewees in a state of growing disbelief. By Lunchtime we were starting to winder when we would find the person that knew what was really going on and how the negotiations had included a proper option for transferring the business.
By the end of day 2 it was entirely clear that that no one had thought about the consequences at all - possibly on either side of the negotiation.
Now one might think that the seller did not care, just wanted the money. However they were a major supplier in their market and their easily identifiable and branded products would be in place throughout the lands of Europe for some years to come, under contract and reliant on continuing service. Their other interests frequently dipped in to the same pool of users. They really should have had some concern, one might have thought.
We decided that there was little likelihood that the new owner could sort out the mess - possibly even if they managed to extract the various chunks of related but unlinked data but from the existing vendor systems. The chances are they would go bust within a year.
If they were able to sort out some of the contracts they had bought that were clearly there for brand placement and local kudos and would have been losing significant amounts of cash every month (they had not spotted those in the due diligence because the data were so fragmented they could not easily be seen through central reporting) they might survive to 18 months, maybe 2 years ...
The Dutch never did get the data they needed to understand what they were dealing with in a way that would help them manage it.
The deal put them out of business about 15 months later, taking down a very successful and profitable core business as the vanity purchase engulfed them.
If the trade requirement post any form of Brexit means that, for example, customs IT systems need to be separated, a new system designed and implement for the UK and then matched with interfaces to the EU systems there may be some challenges.
Government (and, more widely, any and most government scale) projects rarely run smoothly. Many never run at all.
I doubt a paper system would enhance the ease of trade across newly re-created borders. For either party.
One could, of course, ignore such matters in some way at the point of record and let the trucks and containers flow. But that would, presumably, throw up other sorts of bureaucratic problems further down the path.
The idea that the whole system might be shown to be pointless and simply a bureaucratic cost overhead with zero benefit to anyone has some appeal but bureaucrats with vested interest in tax free salaries and large pension pots are unlikely come to a similar conclusion even if the evidence makes it entirely obvious.
There are some aspects of the EU regulation that are not entirely EU initiated. They are simply passed on, EU branded, based in higher level agreements. Typically some sort of organisation running under a UN flag.
Other aspects may be driven by large influences like the USA who may impose certain requirements that no one who may wish to interact with the USA for trade or travel is going to ignore.
But then people find ways of making the systems work because technically they may not be so central and monolithic anyway (especially in the USA).
There may be many traders operating in the EU economic area who are actively looking at ways of playing a newly fragmented system from day one. There must be many opportunities to do so. Unless, of course, the bureaucratic process is tightened up at the point of transfer between regimes.