POST-CLEARANCE CUSTOMS AUDIT WITHIN THE STATE’S ECONOMIC SECURITY RISK MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK AMID GLOBAL SHOCKS

Post-clearance customs audit (PCA) has moved to the centre of economic-security policy as russia’s full-scale invasion, broken supply chains and financial volatility have forced governments to extract more intelligence from trade data while preserving fluid cross-border flows. This article positions PCA as a dynamic risk-management instrument able to reconcile these twin imperatives and offers the first integrated assessment of the Ukrainian model during 2018-2024, a period punctuated by pandemic disruptions and wartime logistics shocks. The study pursues a dual purpose: to test how effectively Ukraine’s PCA architecture cushions fiscal and security vulnerabilities when exogenous turbulence intensifies, and to formulate evidence-based upgrades that align national practice with World Customs Organization guidelines and forthcoming Union Customs Code requirements. A mixed-methods strategy is employed. On the quantitative side, a seven-year panel of 4.1 million “risk” declarations is subjected to trend decomposition, Gini-type concentration indices and counterfactual recovery modelling. Qualitatively, thirty semi-structured interviews with frontline inspectors, traders and data-scientists are triangulated with documentary analysis of 46 regulatory acts. Scenario extrapolations capture the sensitivity of detection rates to shifts in trade geography and algorithmic refresh lags. Results reveal a widening performance gap between automated selectivity and inspector-driven checks. Automated coverage remains dominant (≈93% of filings screened), yet its hit-ratio slid from 15% to below 10% as risk profiles aged and cargo routes pivoted westward. Human audits, though an order of magnitude smaller, preserved a 20% success rate and generated three times more additional revenue per case. Import operations continued to generate four-fifths of cumulative risk exposure, signalling limited adaptive attention to export-linked fraud schemes. Only one-third of assessed duties is ultimately recovered, with protracted dispute cycles, understaffed enforcement units and opaque guarantee release rules forming the principal leakages. The research contributes in three ways. First, it quantifies PCA resilience under compound crises, enriching a literature that has so far relied on peacetime evidence. Second, it advances a hybrid «human-in-the-loop» framework that fuses machine-learning refinement, customs-tax data fusion and expert judgement, thereby reversing the current erosion in detection power. Third, it delivers actionable policy levers: accelerated profile re-calibration, digital case-management to compress appeal timelines, and reciprocal data exchange with EU authorities ahead of accession-driven regulatory convergence. Taken together, these measures would not only stabilise budget inflows during global shocks but also embed PCA as a strategic pillar of the state’s economic-security ecosystem.