Armenia’s Customs Agency & OVIR: Deterrents for Armenia’s Growth and
Diaspora’s Repatriation
2009/07/13
HETQ Online – Investigative Jouralists Of Armenia
Feature Stories society
Persons arriving into Armenia for permanent residence may import their
personal property without paying customs duties; this is stated in
article 105 of Armenia’s customs code. On the surface this appears
like a simple code similar to the ones American and European countries
have for those moving to their countries. However, the details that
Armenia’s code leaves out and the process of Armenia’s heavily
bureaucratic custom agency, geared for maximum bribe making, creates a
nightmare scenario for the repatriate where weeks are lost simply
trying to obtain the goods and use them.
In this article I will try to detail the disastrous process a
repatriate typically goes through based on my experience and that of
several other repatriates I’ve spoken to.
In order to bring in your personal goods to Armenia duty free, you
must register your Armenia address in your 10-year Armenian passport
and only within the first 6 months of your address registration are
you allowed to import your personal items duty free.
At Armenian embassies abroad, Diaspora Armenians can obtain a 10-year
Armenian passport issued by OVIR (Administration Department for
Passports and Visas) with one exception, the Diasporan’s Armenian
names are butchered and foreign spelled names given in the Armenian
passport.
OVIR has a policy to disregard the true and original spelling of
Armenian names; instead they transfer the foreign spelled Armenian
names directly into an Armenian passport.
For example, if you were born in Armenia but moved to the United
States and took citizenship there, and your name has Armenian letters
which doesn’t exist in the English alphabet, then you would get a
different name if you repatriate back to Armenia than the one you were
born with in Armenia.
In order to get your address registered in the passport, you must go
to OVIR’s infamous 5 story Soviet building in Yerevan which has dozens
of doors on each floor and not a single door sign to indicate the
purpose of each office, nor a single receptionist or a sign in the
lobby to guide a person to the right place.
You will be lucky if you find one unbitter employee who knows and is
willing to show you the right office door and even luckier if that
person in the right door explains the registration process to you
without yelling at you to go to `a police station to get an address
confirmation and then come back’. Needless to say you will need at
least two weeks and four times of going back and forward to OVIR in
order to get your address registered in your passport.
Once you have a 10-year passport with your address registered inside,
you must wait until your items arrive to Armenia and then apply for
your duty free right under article 105. If you apply before your
items arrive so that you can retrieve your items quickly upon arrival,
your application will be rejected.
When your items do arrive, you must then present a hand-written
application (dimum) for Article 105 at the main customs office on
Khorenatsi Street. It takes about one week for the customs agent to
call you in for a response.
Meanwhile, you will not be able to retrieve your personal goods until
a response. And although you can retrieve your car upon arrival, you
do not get a license plate number but are allowed days to drive
without plate numbers for ten days. This means you will constantly be
pulled over by the police for driving without plate numbers.
Upon response from customs regarding your Article 105 application, you
will be very fortunate if they approve you right away without any
problems. In my case, after being questioned by the custom agent
regarding my background and the validity of my Armenian passport ,
where I was treated more like a criminal rather than someone
repatriating from America to live in his homeland, my application was
neither rejected nor accepted. Instead I was given a `30 day
temporary import right’ until they conducted `further research with
OVIR regarding the passport’.
Simply stated, a `30 day temporary import right’ means the
bureaucratic nightmare work doubles. Meanwhile you are not allowed to
drive the car for 30 days until the customs agent doing his `research’
gives a final answer to your Article 105 application.
In essence, for one month you will be running around from one custom
agency to another custom agency (all about 20-40 minutes apart and 1-6
hours spent at each location), while missing papers or stamps, missing
digits or inaccurate wording in handwritten documents will force
delays, further going back and forward and the opportunity by custom
agents to take bribes in order to gloss over any `errors’.
Moreover, with regards to the personal items sent, you must remember
in what country each product was made, how much they weigh, what size
they are and what material they’re made of, in order for the broker
you hire to fill out the forms correctly and have your items released.
If, for example, in your application you incorrectly name the country
where your 5 year-old computer or printer was made, that item will not
be released to you from Abovian customs storage; unless of course you
give a bribe or go back to the Araratyan customs agency to redo your
application.
To make a long story short, my car and personal items arrived in
Armenia on May 27, 2009 (see Is Armenia’s custom’s agency for real or
a comedy show?). It took a total of 20 visits to four different custom
agencies, a lot of complaints with customs agents, Armenia’s migration
agency and Diaspora Ministry, until I received my personal items on
June 6, the article 105 approval on June 22 and the right to drive the
car on June 24. Below are the reasons for each of the 20 visits to
the four various custom agencies.
6 visits to Khorenatsi Customs ` 1st time to apply `dimum’ for article
105 before items arrived, 2nd time to `dimum’ for article 105 when car
and items arrived, 3rd time for interview, 4th time to pick up
temporary approval document, 5th time to `dimum’ for final approval of
article 105, 6th time to pick up final approved document
5 visits to Noragavit Cusotms ` 1st time to pickup car upon arrival,
2nd time for temporary import right clearance by hiring a broker, 3rd
time for final import clearance (but I was sent back because mailed
documents from main custom house on Khorenatsi had not arrived), 4th
time for final import clearance by hiring broker again, 5th time to
fix error in wording description for type of car and three digits
missing in car model number according to Armenia’s Department of Motor
Vehicles (DMV) or `Guyee’.
5 visits to Abovian Customs ` 1st time to pick-up list of personal
items to take to Arartatyan agency, 2nd time to submit paperwork from
Araratyan agency and pay storage fee, 3rd time to pick up items eight
days after arrival and pay for more storage fees, 4th time to pickup
missing paper they had forgotten to give but was requested by
Araratyan agency, 5th time to deliver final article 105 approval
papers.
4 visits to Arartayan Customs ` 1st time to apply `dimum’ for personal
item storage rights at the Abovian customs storage, 2nd time to hire
broker to create paperwork for temporary release of personal items
stored at Abovian, 3rd time to hire broker to create paperwork for
final release approval, 4th time to bring missing document from
Abovian customs and to pickup final approval forms.
Whether the problem is plain stupidity, iron curtain Soviet mentality,
or money making opportunity for customs agents/brokers which are
causing Armenia’s laws and its implementation to be so backward, the
result is that it is preventing this country from moving forward and
becoming a stronger/efficient nation.
For a country that has more of its people living outside than inside,
Armenia cannot afford to create road blocks for people’s rights to
their own names or simple access to their belongings in and out of the
country.
The solution to make Armenia a place where more Armenians want to live
is simple ` get rid of laws and the implementation of laws that
torture people, and implement common sense laws that make people’s
lives easy and efficient.
After all, the job of every government is to make the lives of its
citizens better, and not the opposite, as it currently is in Armenia.
Dro Tsarukyan