Elimination of the Customs Broker Registry and the Registry of Importers/Exporters

Among the modifications set in Decree No. 70/2023 (published December 21, 2023), the changes made to Article I of the Customs Code (Law 22,415) considering the persons involved in foreign trade stand out.

One of the main changes is made to Section 37 to the Customs Code, allowing individuals and legal entities to carry out the declaration of the goods to Customs on their own or by means of an authorized proxy. The prior text mandated individuals to carry out the declaration of the goods with the intervention of a registered customs broker.

The registration of individuals as customs brokers is also deregulated by eliminating Sections 42 – 46 of the Customs Code. The new text of Section 41 of the Customs Code only indicated the different situations and causes of why an individual may not act as a customs broker, which are very similar to those that prevented an individual to be registered as such.

In this line, Section 92 of the Customs Code was also modified. Now, any individual or legal entity may register customs declarations and carry out foreign trade operations without needing to be priorly registered. This modification implies the elimination of the Registry of Importers/Exporters that Customs kept. In the same fashion, many of the incompatibilities to carry out import and export operations were consolidated in Section 94 of the Customs Code.