AEO, do you wish to become an AEO?

Before you begin the process of quality assurance, it is important that you check that your business meet all the general criteria to obtain AEO status.

An AEO certification is basically a process where you show us that you have adequate procedures in place to carry out your business activities. As support for the quality assurance, you should use Guidelines for certification.

Before you apply

The basis for the quality assurance is that you give us an account of the procedures you follow in your business. Guidelines for certification can help you in this task. When you use the guidelines, your first indicate your role(s) in the international supply chain and the type of AEO certificate you are interested in (Customs simplifications and/or Security and safety). You should use the guidelines as a tool to catalogue the procedures you already have in place and identify which ones you need to add to be granted AEO status. It is essential that your procedures describe the way you actually work, that they are well documented and well known within the organisation.

To ensure that you have sufficient knowledge of customs declarations within your business, you can with advantage use our online knowledge test.

If you do not wish to, or cannot, develop the procedures and the documentation yourself, you can employ a third party to help you. This third party could be a consultant, an accounting firm, a customs agent or some other operator. We do not impose any requirements on the party you employ — it is always you, being the applicant company, who hold the responsibility that the procedures and the documentation are accurate and up to date at the time of our audit.

Application

When you consider the documentation of your procedures to be complete, you send the application and the supplementary annex to us.

Once the application has been accepted, we contact you to book a certification visit where we audit your documented procedures and any requests for simplifications you might have. The procedures should be of such a good quality that the risk of errors in your submission of data and your flow is minimal. We may also propose improvements that will make your handling of customs matters smoother.

After the Certification

You will be assigned an initial point of contact with us, through a specially appointed customs support. You and the customs support will jointly continue the realisation of simplifications and improvements of your procedures concerning customs matters as well as security and safety. You can also turn to the customs support with any question you might have concerning all your customs related matters.

General requirements to become an AEO
Application for AEO certificate

Services

Guidelines for certification

Authorised Economic Operator; first page