Administrative Penalties for Customs Infringements in Ukraine: Wandering Sideways

The effectiveness of customs enforcement is one of the critical issues of Ukrainian customs legislation. This is due to the emphasis on the fiscal functions of customs and the excessively high share of state revenue administered by customs authorities. Unlike other parts of the Ukrainian customs legislation, the issue of sanctions for customs infringements remains unharmonized and contains norms inherited from Soviet law. The lack of sanctions against legal entities, the differentiation between negligence and intention, and the disproportionate size of sanctions negatively impact customs enforcement. However, attempts to reform this field have not addressed these problems. The proposals to follow the experience of the EU member states, as a rule, do not consider the work being done to create the Union legal framework for customs infringements and sanctions.