Appendix 5: Initiatives Complete, Underway or Planned by the Agencies Working at the Border to Improve Service Delivery

In 2012 Cabinet recommended that there would be significantly greater benefit to be gained through leveraging the existing work programmes of the border agencies, especially IT investments, to deliver further improvements to risk management and service delivery. These new initiatives, would enable the sector to focus on delivering services together, to enable:

• more effective management of risk, ideally offshore, through better targeting of risk and the sector sharing information and intelligence
• more joined-up approach to promote voluntary compliance by passengers, importers and craft operators
• sharing tools and resources, and carrying out tasks on each other's behalf to enable the sector to manage increasing volumes of trade and travellers, and the range of risks to be managed
• simpler processes and reduced intervention for low-risk passengers, traders and craft operators as agencies would be able to better identify them through partnerships, more sophisticated profiling and targeting and wider use of automated passenger processing
• benefits for clients through reduced compliance costs and other regulatory-related costs, as agencies would perform tasks on each other's behalf and coordinate inspections and searches.

Agencies have subsequently worked on delivering new initiatives to respond to this.

In addition to SmartGate (see Appendix Four), the following border initiatives were implemented prior to June 2013 (i.e. when the Kiwis Count case study was published) to improve service delivery:

• Segmenting passengers in a way that allows the Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI) to target resources towards people that pose a higher biosecurity risk. For example, Australian and New Zealand passport holders which MPI deems low risk can be cleared via the "Green lane" (formerly Direct Exit), where their baggage is not x-rayed. All other passengers, including New Zealanders, Australians, and passport holders from all other countries, are subject to full x-ray baggage screening and/or physical search.
• The introduction of joint counters at the majority of ports around the country. This allows for a single contact point for those importers and exporters who are requiring assistance or need to present documentation to MPI or Customs.

Initiatives implemented since June 2013 include:

• Immigration's routine border referrals are now being managed by Customs at the Primary Line. This change improves the timely facilitation of low risk passengers and has allowed an increased focus for Immigration at secondary processing
• the roll out of the Trade Single Window which is part of the JBMS. This ultimately provides a single point through which clients (importers, exporters, airlines, shipping companies, express couriers and freight forwarders) will submit information to, and receive responses from, border agencies
• express freight consignments are now being inspected by both MPI and Customs at the Customs' Air Cargo Inspection Facility at Auckland Airport. This initiative was developed in close collaboration with the Conference of Asia Pacific Express Carriers (CAPEC) and rolled out on 11 June 2013. There is now a single and consistent process where goods are x-rayed and inspected by Customs and MPI officers working side by side, making better use of resources and cutting down on clearance time
• MPI has installed 12 new x-ray machines at Auckland, Christchurch, Wellington and Queenstown airports. The new equipment has greater image quality and manipulation functionality, improved passenger baggage collection area and easy image archiving and retrieval
• MPI has increased the number of detector dogs and dog handlers in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.

Collaboration and looking for opportunities for continuous improvement are part of the way agencies' deliver their core border services. Agencies' key priority at October 2014 is to complete current initiatives such as JBMS. The vision of joined up services is also being delivered through SmartGate, sharing information, rationalising facilities at the ports and airports through initiatives such as shared service desks, shared facilities and bringing operational staff together in one place, coordinating cargo inspections and agency interactions with arriving commercial and private craft where possible, and co-warranting inspectors to undertake tasks on behalf of each other. Agencies are also planning to examine opportunities to improve the timeliness and scope of pre-arrival passenger information.