Design and Analysis of e-Government Control: the Green Corridor between Finland and Russia

Confronted with the pressure of increased security threats and financial fraud, Customs administrations worldwide changed regulations and added restrictions to international trade in recent years. At the same time, governments also want to reduce the administrative burden for businesses in order to create an economically competitive zone. The EU is now implementing e-government ideas in new procedures. An important issue in designing new customs and trade procedures is whether the new procedures mitigate control risks. In this paper we present a model-based approach to support domain experts in investigating whether (redesigned) customs procedures mitigate control risks. We describe a methodological application of our “AAD”, or Actor-Activity-Document approach of control principles from accounting and auditing literature, to analyze trade procedures. As a proof of concept, we apply our “AAD” approach to the case of the Green Corridor between Finland and Russia.