47 Containers in Hamburg

Initial Situation

A manufacturing company from central Poland exported industrial goods to buyers in Asia. The goods were shipped through the Port of Hamburg - one of Europe's largest container hubs.

The customs agent correctly filed export declarations in the Polish AES customs system. The declarations received MRNs and were forwarded to the German ATLAS system as indirect export declarations. The problem was that the customs agent had failed to register the exports in Hamburg's port system. Without this registration, the terminal could not confirm that the containers had been loaded onto vessels and had departed the port.

As a result, 47 MRNs remained open. The company did not receive any export confirmation confirmations for these containers, blocking the application of the 0% VAT rate on exports valued at over EUR 2 million.

Complication

The client came to us when the oldest unclosed MRNs were already over 5 months old. Some containers had sailed many weeks earlier, and the shipping manifests for those voyages had been moved to archive storage. This meant the standard automatic procedure for matching MRNs to port data could no longer work - we had to reconstruct the historical records.

An additional challenge was that several containers had been transhipped to different vessels as part of loading plan changes by the shipping line. The actual departure vessel data differed from the original booking data.

Our Action

We started work immediately after receiving the list of MRNs and transport documents. The process involved the following steps:

1. Verification of each MRN - checking the current status of all 47 declarations in the customs system and identifying the specific cause of the block for each one.
2. Reconstruction of archived manifest data - for containers that had sailed months earlier, we obtained archived shipping manifest data and confirmed the actual loading dates and vessel names.
3. Correction of transhipment data - for containers that had changed vessel, we updated the information in the port system to reflect the actual transport routing.
4. Bulk registration in the port system - after gathering and verifying all data, we registered the export for each container in Hamburg's port system.
5. Status monitoring - we tracked the processing of each declaration and responded to any rejections or requests for additional data.

Result

45 out of 47 MRNs were closed within 5 business days. The company received export confirmation confirmations for each closed container, enabling the application of the 0% VAT rate and settlement of the export with the tax office.

The remaining 2 MRNs required an enquiry procedure - in their case, the shipping manifest data contained discrepancies that needed to be resolved in coordination with the shipping line. These cases were also eventually closed, but it took an additional 2 weeks.