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Overview of E-cert

E-cert is the shortened name for Electronic Certification. E-cert is an NZFSA web application used to assist with providing government-to-government assurances that animal products exported from New Zealand comply with the regulatory requirements of importing countries. E-cert supports New Zealand’s international competitiveness and credibility and hence is an important tool for the export sector and the New Zealand economy.

There are three different E-cert systems. These are:

• Animal Products E-cert used for exported animal products excluding dairy products (ie meat, seafood, game, poultry, eggs, petfood, bee products, hides, wool and skins)

• Dairy E-cert used for exported dairy products

• Phyto E-cert used for exported plant products. This E-cert system is owned and operated by Biosecurity, MAF.

The primary purpose of E-cert is to:

• track the market eligibility and product status from the time of production until export (verification)

• approve and print sanitary export certificates (certification).

The content of the export certificates are supported by the verification regime which manages or controls the advice about the product compliance with importing country requirements. An approved export certificate is available to the appropriate border agency of the importing country (electronically or in paper form).

In Animal Products E-cert an export certificate is supported by an extensive collection of approved electronic internal transfer documents that track the product movements within New Zealand. These are called eligibility documents or eligibility declarations.

There are three groups of authorised E-cert users:

• New Zealand Industry users (consignor / consignee role)

• Independent reviewers (Inspector / Official Verifier role)

• Importing country officials (Border Inspector role)

Electronic certification is a mechanism to:

• Increase the robustness of the pre-certification verification checks

• Improve the efficiency of the export certification process

• Significantly reduce the risk of errors

• Provide a means to improve the quality and range of data from which to make strategic decisions

• Reduce the likelihood of fraud. Paper certificates can be fraudulently used and providing international agencies with the means to validate paper certificates significantly increases the likelihood that they will be detected. In addition, the full electronic approach would mean that paper certificates would not be created and the ability to create fraudulent certificates would be significantly reduced.

• Reduce the total cost of verification and certification

• Provide the ability to rapidly respond to increasingly changing market requirements.

How Animal Products E-cert is used

The core component of Animal Products E-cert is the tracking and recording of meat and seafood products between registered premises and international borders.

An authorised company user accesses Animal Products E-cert over the internet to input the required data. This can be undertaken in a variety of ways – online data entry, online batch file submission or automated batch file transmission from a company system.

Once the document is submitted, an e-mail (if requested by the Inspector) is sent to the appropriate Official Inspector to advise that the new document has been received and is ready for their decision. The Inspector then accesses Animal Products E-cert and decides on the outcome of the request based upon their knowledge of the premises and the content of the certificate. These steps are repeated with each transfer of product as a product is not allowed to be transferred before approval is given where the meat is for human consumption. Products from some documents may be combined with other products to create a new document. This could be repeated many times. E-cert provides a means to track through the history of product.

When the product is ready for export, an export certificate is created. This is printed and signed to go with the product, and/or electronically sent to the country of destination. The international authority can then access Animal Products E-cert to validate the data and affirm that the certificate received is correct. An export certificate can have one or hundreds of approved eligibility documents supporting the decision that the product meets the importing country’s regulatory requirements.