Industry Government Company As an agency under Malaysia's Ministry of Finance, Royal Malaysian Customs (RMC) is responsible for collecting direct taxes and excise duties. It is also tasked with providing customs facilitation to the trade and industrial sectors, as well as improve compliance with customs regulations. This is important because as a country that is actively promoting itself as a trading nation, Malaysia needs to ensure that customs formalities are simplified to attract the global trading community. Annual IT Budget Not available

Although RMC may be best known for its push toward ePermit, a paperless permit processing system that won the ZDNet Asia Public Sector Project of the Year, it has other notable technology initiatives as well.

In 2004, for instance, the RMC spearheaded the development of a vessel information system (VIS) for the maritime community to provide vessel arrival notifications to Malaysian port operators.

At the end of 2004, the VIS was further enhanced to enable the submission of electronic manifests, or notifications, via the VIS to all maritime ports in the country. A committee chaired by RMC, the International Ship Owners' Association of Malaysia (ISOAM) and systems integrator Dagang Net, was also formed to standardize the messaging formats to be implemented.

The manifest notification subsystem, known as eManifest (eMS), serves as the central gateway for all maritime electronic vessel arrival notifications and manifests in Malaysia. The eMS, with a host of Internet-enabled technologies and browser-based user interfaces, will be introduced on a gradual basis to all the country's ports.

In October 2005, the RMC also launched DutyNet, an Internet-based customs duty payment system developed by Dagang Net. Bumiputra Commerce Bank's Internet business banking portal, Bizchannel, has been connected electronically to the DutyNet system. The initiative has enabled importers and exporters to submit customs duty payment electronically, doing away with tedious manual processes.

RMC director-general, Tan Sri Abdul Halil Abdul Mutalib, told Malaysian news agency Bernama last year that DutyNet system would help expedite customs clearance and duty payments. He added that RMC is expected to receive RM12 billion (US$3.3 billion) annually from the new system. Although RMC had an earlier electronic funds transfer system, Halil said the transactions were only possible during banking hours. As such, only RM1.8 billion (US$490 million) of annual duty payments were collected previously.