One might assume that goods entering the EU territory are immediately cleared through customs upon arrival, and then transported to unloading points once duties and taxes have been paid. If this were the case in practice, a single border crossing would take months, with customs offices inspecting every shipment in detail before release for circulation — and that is without even considering the duty and tax payment period during which shipments would have to wait.
To avoid increasing the already considerable burden on border crossings and major entry terminals, these points prioritise onward movement and transit, while customs supervision is guaranteed throughout the journey. Customs legislation has developed the transit procedure for exactly this purpose: a shipment presented and declared to customs is forwarded to a customs office in one of the EU member states.
The conditions are that the vehicle must be sealed with a customs seal and that financial security (commonly known as a customs guarantee) must be provided for the customs and tax burden of the declared goods. When these conditions are met, customs authorities authorise the transit, and T1 documents printed from the specialist systems accompany the shipments. At Vámkapu Zrt.'s customs yards, we process road, rail, container and combined freight units arriving under T1 procedures on a daily basis.
At Vámkapu Zrt.'s customs yards, these T1 procedures are usually concluded and import clearance for free circulation is performed. However, approximately half of the high-volume traffic arriving at distribution hubs and consolidation freight forwarders continues to another country or to an industrial facility, where the import customs procedures are completed.
To provide these solutions, our company holds large-scale guarantee coverage, enabling us to simultaneously provide TC31 and TC33 type guarantees — internationally accepted — for a large number of shipments, allowing us to initiate T1 transit procedures in significant volumes.
Transit procedures are initiated from terminals at our customs yards and from major distribution points. We also hold authorised consignor status and authorised seals, which allow us to ensure fast, low-turnaround transit of non-EU goods under customs supervision.
As Hungary is a member of the Transit Convention as a full EU member state, our authorised guarantee is also valid in the convention's member countries (most frequent routes: United Kingdom, Turkey, Serbia). T2 procedures can be used to initiate transit to these destinations. For EU goods transiting through third-country territory, or for shipments to special fiscal territories, we issue T2L and T2LF documents.