1. Responsibilities of Organisations and Households
Organisations and Households shall take responsibility when sourcing timber to ensure that only legal timber enters the supply chain, including when sourcing timber domestically, and shall exercise due diligence when souring imported timber, as specified in Section 4.4 of this Annex V.
Organisations and Households are responsible for documenting and reporting timber inputs and outputs, complying with reporting requirements to the relevant Government agencies as stipulated by the legislation and regulations, in order to allow for volume based reconciliation and identification of suspicious timber flows as stipulated in Section 6.6.2 below. These responsibilities are specified in Appendix 2 of this Annex V.
2. Responsibilities of Government agencies
The timber supply chain control system is conducted by a number of Government agencies, of which the local Forest Protection Agencies have the main responsibility for conducting checks at each stage of the supply chain and archiving documents, as specified in Appendix 2 of this Annex V.
The responsibility of Forest Protection Agencies for supply chain control includes:
a) Reception, entry and archiving of supply chain declarations by Organisations and Households.
b) Systematic, random and ad hoc physical inspections, particularly on the basis of the analyses of supply chain data.
c) Analysis of data to provide for volume-based reconciliations between:
- Quantitative data at different stages of the supply chain as identified in Section 6.2;
- Quantitative data of suppliers and buyers;
- Data declared by Organisations and Households and the physical batch of timber;
- Input and output analysis at processing sites;
- Organisations and Households in the context of investigations of suspicious timber flows.
d) Verify and endorse information in input and output monitoring books of Organisations handling timber from domestic natural forests.
e) Inspect input and output monitoring books of Organisations as a part of systematic inspection and a part of ad hoc inspection on suspicion of risk.
The above reconciliation functions are carried out at each stage of the supply chain according to existing procedures as well as data collection and management systems, to be revised or developed before the FLEGT licensing regime is operational.
Supply chain control is conducted according to a plan including systematic and random checks. Ad hoc checks are conducted on identifying or receiving any information of any sign of violation by Organisations and Households.
At each stage of the supply chain, the checks by the Forest Protection Agency include the following elements:
- Conformity between the Timber Product Dossier and actual timber;
- Archiving of the Timber Product Dossier;
- Examination of other verifiers relevant to different categories of timber at each stage of the supply chain for Households and Organisations;
- On identification of suspicious timber flows, checking conformity between suppliers and buyers.
The responsibility of the Customs Authority for the control of transit timber includes:
- Reception, entry and archiving of customs dossiers by traders.
- Systematic, random and ad hoc documentary and physical inspections, particularly onthe basis of the Customs risk assessment system.
- Carry out and provide data for volume-based reconciliations between points of entry and exit of transit timber.
The management of violations of supply chain control is described further in Section 11 of this Annex V.
Source: VPA/FLEGT
