Over 1,300 haulers used the e-booking service for international freight transport permits from January 1 through January 12, 2020, the press service of the Infrastructure Ministry of Ukraine reported on its website on Tuesday.

"The pilot project of e-booking permits for haulers successfully works. In the first 12 days of 2020, more than 1,300 haulers used the e-booking permissions service, who booked about 8,000 permits through the electronic transport portal e-transport.gov.ua. Thanks to the digitalization of the process, equal conditions have been created for all haulers to access the service, without any corruption component," the ministry's press service said, citing Infrastructure Minister Vladyslav Krykliy.

According to the release, the e-booking service has several advantages for business. In particular, the portal shows the available number of permits at the points of their issue, and the booked permit cannot be issued to another hauler. In addition, the hauler himself selects the point of issue, where he plans to obtain the booked permit.

"The hauler has the opportunity of planning a trip and protecting himself from penalties for violation of customs legislation. The reserved permit is available for issuing to the hauler for five days. If the hauler does not receive the permit within a certain period of time, its booking will be canceled automatically and the permit will be available to other haulers," the minister said.

According to the minister, the introduction of the e-booking service helped to identify problematic issues in the permit issuing system at the technical and organizational levels. In particular, a large number of haulers were found which, contrary to the requirements of the law, did not submit timely notifications of data changes in their licensing cases.

"We will continue developing and scaling up the successful experience of e-booking. There is an ambitious goal to translate the issuance of permits for international transportation of goods in digital format. However, not all countries agree on this step. We are working on a solution to the issue and are confident that jointly we will succeed in this effort," Krykliy said.

Ukraine's Ministry of Infrastructure together with the Ministry of Digital Transformation on December 27, 2019 launched the electronic services transport portal (e-transport.gov.ua), combining services for all modes of transport.