Last week, the National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America, Inc. (NCBFAA) hosted a conference in Baltimore, MD targeting software developers interested in obtaining more information about US Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP’s) Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) and upcoming technical changes related to the PGA Message Set, Entry Summary Edits, Automated Corrections/Cancellations and AES Re-Engineering/Manifest Baseline development. During the conference, CBP made two important announcements which were heard and noted first hand from an Integration Point representative. These two announcements included:

• CBP announced that it plans to mandate the use of manifest and cargo release in ACE by December 31, 2015 and mandate the use of ACE by December 31, 2016. CBP also provided a tentative release schedule for seven deployments that will lead up to this mandate.  Each deployment will consist of one or two increments, and each increment will span over a period of twelve to thirteen weeks. On this road map, CBP announced some exciting functionalities to be released in the near future such as automated cancellation and/or correction of entries, integration of simplified entry with other modes of transport and certifying simplified entry through summary. In addition to the enhanced simplified entry process, CBP also gradually plans to include the validations that were not initially included in ACE entry summaries.
• CBP is also working on the reengineering of AES and pilot programs of entry data collection for various Participating Government Agencies such as the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and US Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) and CBP plans to deploy this later on in 2013 and early in 2014.

Now there is relevance in all of this. It reinforces the growing importance of Customs’ focus on “cargo management”.  Far too much emphasis is placed on the goods declaration alone. This is not only short-sighted but demonstrates an ignorance of the global supply chain. Without the ‘cargo report’ (manifest) the goods declaration is little more than a testament of what is purported to have been imported and exported.

Related articles

• CBP Goes Paperless: The New Electronic I-94 and What it Means for Travelers (vbimmigration.wordpress.com)