CBP Has No Funding to Implement 24 Priority ACE Edits Wanted by Trade

During a recent interview with Broker Power, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials provided an update on ACE, including the 24 groups of high priority ACE entry summary edits, Post Summary Correction functionality, the deployment of M1, the document imaging system, etc.

This is Part II of a multipart series of summaries on the interview and discusses the 24 groups of “high priority” ACE entry summary edits requested by the trade¹. See future issues of ITT for additional topics.

None of the 24 High Priority Edits Have Been Deployed, No Schedule or Funding

While CBP has not yet deployed any of the 24 groups of high priority ACE entry summary edits that were requested by the trade, they have are still under consideration. As the entry summary code has already been deployed, CBP is looking at options and the possibility of incorporating the entry summary edits into the coding moving forward.

There is currently no schedule for implementing those edits and there has been no dedicated/allocated funding for the edits.

(In April 2010, officials announced that CBP was creating a task force on the 24 groups of high priority edits that were requested by the trade. The task force was to include CBP and trade members, and would examine how to best achieve the objectives of enhanced entry summary edits within the current budget environment. The new ACE Business Office is looking at how to move this effort forward.)

CBP Looking at Compensating Controls

CBP is going to have to look at these high priority edits and evaluate how to implement them from a cost and schedule perspective over time. CBP is also looking at compensating controls that could be deployed that would beneficial from both the cost and schedule perspectives.

(In December 2010, the Trade Support Network (TSN) Entry Committee met with the Transition Committee to review the ACE edits. The committee made proposals to CBP as to what may be able to be done to mitigate the risks of the edits not being available in ACE Entry Summary processing. Suggestions included better documentation for items such as merchandise processing fee (MPF)/ Harbor Maintenance Fee (HMF) rules so the trade knows when the fees are required or not required. Another suggestion was to ask CBP to send out a CSMS message to notify the trade that they made changes to the tariff information as they make the changes so that they do not have out of date tariff information while waiting for CBP to put out a large tariff update.)

¹In 2007, CBP proposed that 63 current Automated Commercial System (ACS) edits specific to the commercial preparation of the entry summary not be carried over into ACE. TSN reviewed and evaluated CBP's proposal and responded with 24 groups of edits that members believed were critical to keep. CBP's proposal was originally called “Edit Lite” and is also referred to as "Edit Modification."

(See ITT’s Online Archives or 12/21/10 news, 10122124, for BP summary of TSN saying that they want more fee and tariff announcements as a cushion if ACE edits are not ready.

See ITT’s Online Archives or 03/16/10 news, 10031610, for BP summary announcing that the deployment of the 24 groups of edits would be slow due to lack of resources.)