HS 2002-HS 2017: Notes of the Tariff Nomenclature and the Additional Notes of the EU Revisited

Abstract

The fundamental rules for the classification of goods in compliance with the Harmonized System (HS) for the description and coding of goods are, according to General Rule 1, solely the six general rules of classification, the terms of headings and notes (and according to General Rule 6, the terms of subheadings and subheading notes). The rules of the European Union (EU) tariff schedule are complex, and while the overall number of headings and subheadings is known, the notes of the HS nomenclature, the Combined Nomenclature (CN) and the Common Customs Tariff (CCT) of the EU have only been examined in a systematic way for the CN 2007. This paper reviews all notes (and subheading notes) which are in force worldwide by virtue of the HS 2017 (for sections and chapters), examines the previous versions of the HS (HS 2002, HS 2007, HS 2012) and also examines the sections and chapters in front of which the EU has placed further so called ‘additional notes’ in its CN which are only valid throughout the EU. The HS 2017 contains 386 notes and 63 subheading notes, which are valid worldwide. The EU has added 109 additional notes within the CN and the CCT (as of December 2016) that influence the implementation of the CCT by the application of different and more rigid definitions of goods and methods of analysis. Sixty per cent of the additional notes relate to agricultural goods (Chapters 1–24). The 558 notes of the CN are legal rules that apply to the 1,222 HS headings, 5,387 HS subheadings and 9,528 CN subheadings. This clearly demonstrates the complexity of the rules of the CCT which contains more than 16,500 legal rules for the classification of goods.