Towards a Methodology for Designing E-Government Control Procedures

The EU is currently modernizing customs legislation and practices. Main pillars in the new vision are an intensive use of IT (Customs becomes eCustoms), partnerships between Customs administrations and businesses (G2B), and collaboration between national Customs administrations (G2G). But how to design new customs control procedures? Very little theory exists, and an inspection of current procedures shows that they are vulnerable to fraud, and thus badly designed. Therefore we identify a need for developing theory for the design of government control procedures. Some research has been done on designing inter-organizational controls in B2B transactions. In this paper we argue that with certain modifications control principles used in B2B are also suitable for the Government-to-Business context, and we present a conceptual model for designing government controls in G2B, based on earlier work of Bons. We use a study on customs procedures for the export of agricultural goods from the EU to Russia as a proof of concept.