New Computerised Transit System – Phase 5 (NCTS-P5)

What has changed under NCTS-P5?

If you submit transit declarations into our current NCTS-P4 system for goods transiting across international borders under customs control, you will notice the following significant changes in NCTS-P5:

• A new data set for the transit declaration, as specified under the Union Customs Code. While most of the information needed to complete your transit declaration is the same as the data used in NCTS-P4, there will be some new data elements. Details are contained in NCTS-P5 Message Structures document. The transit declaration will look different with ‘Data fields’ being replaced by ‘Data elements’.
• It will allow you to lodge your transit declarations up to 30 days before you present your goods to Customs. If you lodge your transit declaration pre-presentation, you will have to submit a presentation notification to Customs when your goods are ready to transit.
• It will facilitate registration of ‘Incidents en route’. For this reason, a new office role is introduced, which is named ‘Office of Incidents Registration’.
• It will interface electronically with our export declaration system, Automated Export System (AES), to support the scenario ‘export followed by transit’.
• Provision of a six digit HS code for all goods moving in NCTS. This will be optional during the European Union (EU) transition period.

Note

The EU transition period is to allow all EU Member states to deploy NCTS-P5. This transition period is expected to end on 2 December 2024. Some of the business and technical rules will be different during this transition period. Details are available in the NCTS-P5 trader guide.

New messages in NCTS-P5:

• ‘Notification to amend declaration’ (IE022) message. This is sent by the office of departure to the holder of the transit procedure in the scenario ‘export followed by transit’.
• When customs transit declarations are pre-lodged, a 'Presentation notification for the pre-lodged declaration’ (IE170) message, must be lodged when the goods are presented.
• ‘Forwarded incident notification to ED’ (IE182) message is sent to the holder of the transit procedure when an ‘Incident en route’ has taken place.
• ‘Functional Nack’ (IE906) message is used to report business validation errors, for example, violation of rules and conditions.
• ‘XML Nack’ (IE917) message is used to reject external domain messages for syntactic validation errors, for example, XSD errors.

You will find further information about what will change under NCTS-P5 and the key timelines in NCTS-P5 presentation.

Further information

If you require further information, please email UCCITDev@revenue.ie