Overhaul of PGA Import Regulations May Not be Possible by 2016, Says CBP's Smith

SAN DIEGO, Calif. -- A wide-ranging update to the trade-related regulations of agencies outside CBP may not be possible by the 2016 deadline for completion of the International Trade Data System (ITDS), said CBP Office of International Trade Commissioner Brenda Smith. "People rarely want to change regulations," she said Oct. 17 at the Western Cargo Conference. "My guess is that, there is a lot more work than we are going to be able to get to by 2016," she said. Still, the Border Interagency Executive Council is already discussing ways to make improvements, such as aligning differing definitions between CBP and the Food and Drug Administration for unique identifiers and port facilities, she said.

There's "pretty well 100 percent engagement" from the key agencies in working on ITDS, said Smith. "We have the right legal frameworks in place, the right [information technology] frameworks in place" and they are on the schedule, Smith said. The Automated Commercial Environment serves as the technical base for allowing the participating government agencies to work within the single window, which will make it so filers do not need to file information to multiple agencies that ask for overlapping data, she said. "Every other agency whose mission is not primarily trade facilitation is having to make a major cultural shift in their thinking about how to integrate trade facilitation with their enforcement mission." While it's been a "big lift" for those agencies, there's been "great progress," she said.

Frequent testing of the ACE deployments by filers will be an imperative as CBP moves closer and closer to the deadlines requiring submissions in ACE, said Smith. The problematic release of the government's health insurance website, healthcare.gov, "really made many people from the government very sensitive to the need to test," said Smith. "What we need are for people to use it and tell us what's wrong," she said. For instance, CBP recently sought volunteers to test Lacey Act submissions for the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service within ACE and ITDS, also known as the "single window" (see 1410170013).

CBP plans to finalize the technical guidance for ACE by January and finish all capabilities by July next year, she said. "I would have liked it earlier, but we've got a lot of holes in there," she said. As of Nov. 1, 2015, all entries and associated entry summaries must be filed in ACE, though smaller impact items and things that CBP doesn't finish in time will be completed by the final ACE deadline, Oct. 1, 2016, she said.