The JRC develops and applies innovative statistical methods needed by the European Anti-fraud Office and its partners in the EU Member States for the protection of the financial interests of the European Union. JRC's work focuses on several Customs commercial fraud-control problems. Among them, the evasion of (ad valorem) import duties, VAT fraud and trade-based money laundering relate to the misdeclaration of the trade price and are addressed via the statistical detection of price outliers in EU trade data. The detection of price outliers has been proven useful in a-posteriori controls conducted by EU customs services on relatively recent transactions. The price outlier detection procedure, when applied to appropriate trade datasets, produces outliers-free data on which reliable estimates can be calculated for the market prices of the traded products: these estimates are called “fair prices”. These estimates can be used as a support to the determination of the customs value at the moment of the customs formalities or for post-clearance checks. This report presents the fair price estimation method and its relation with the price outliers’ detection approach.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen
