On 7 June 2021, OLAF Director-General Ville Itälä and the Secretary General of the World Customs Organization (WCO), Kunio Mikuriya, signed a new agreement enhancing cooperation between the two bodies. The new “Administrative Cooperation Arrangement” widens the scope and operational possibilities of a previous arrangement from 2003. Whereas the 2003 arrangement covered only the exchange of information on tobacco seizures, the new one allows the information sharing on a wider range of fraudulent activities, e.g., counterfeiting and illicit trade in protected species.

The arrangement will also allow closer and more effective cooperation on joint operations. OLAF will be able to share information with the WCO members (customs administrations worldwide) on customs fraud cases (exchange is, however, limited to non-personal data only).

The arrangement follows a last year’s agreement between OLAF and the WCO that linked the two main databases of the bodies with regard to tobacco smuggling, i.e. the WCO’s Customs Enforcement Network (CEN) database and the Customs Information System (CIS+) managed by OLAF (→ eucrim 2/2020, 79-80).