Trade Enforcement Posture Across Federal Agencies Needs Improvement, Says CBP's Owen

NEWPORT, R.I. -- CBP and other federal agencies are “not as strong as we need to be” in terms of trade enforcement posture, said Todd Owen, CBP assistant commissioner for the Office of Field Operations (OFO) on March 31. Owen spoke at Northeast Trade and Transportation conference hosted by the Coalition of New England Companies for Trade. Such enforcement is an area “where we need to do a better job” and will be a priority for Owen going forward, he said.

The agency needs to be focused on the “bad actors” as “there are companies out there that aren’t playing by the rules,” he said. That includes antidumping duty evasion, transshipment, undervaluation and other kinds of fraud, he said. “I don’t believe OFO and CBP overall is as strong in this area as we once were,” said Owen. “I think our criminal investigator, our sister agency with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is not as strong in this area as we once were and I also don’t think the U.S. Attorneys offices are as strong in prosecuting trade fraud cases as they once were.”

CBP plans to finish the process of giving three Centers of Excellence and Expertise post-release processing for entire industries by the end of September, he said. CBP recently finished the first phase of the transition for the three CEEs -- electronics in Los Angeles, pharmaceuticals in New York, and petroleum and minerals in Houston -- moving over some staff and responsibilities from the ports, he said. The second phase will begin April 6 (see 1503310014), he said. The CEEs' staff are divided up in three groups: one dealing with partnerships, another with compliance and the last with enforcement. “The knowledge that we see developing in the CEEs doesn’t compare to anything we have had before in CBP,” said Owen. Once “we have these first three CEEs at 100 percent, which will be sometime this summer, then we will work to stand the other seven with the lessons learned from the first three,” he said.

Each CEE will be responsible for dealing with intellectual property rights enforcement, including exclusion orders, for the particular industry. Whether to keep exclusion order enforcement within CBP headquarters or move it to the CEEs had been one issue the agency had been grappling with (see 14061612). While there will be differing levels of engagement on the IPR issues based on commodity, that enforcement will fall within each CEE, he said. Those in the Electronics CEE, where Owen previously worked, developed a knowledge of the “very technical” exclusion orders by working with the patent holders, he said. That’s much different from going through one of the 42 service ports where the import specialists are based, he said. “Expecting 42 service ports to act uniformly and carry out the same focus on something as technical as an exclusion order to the IT software on some of these smart phones just didn’t happen,” he said. The CEEs will also take up various issues that may be unique to a particular product area, Owen said. For instance, the petroleum CEE deals with a lot of pipeline issues, something the other CEEs would not really face, he said.

West Coast port congestion is starting to improve, though there are continued issues, said Owen. “It’s my understanding that the situation has improved a little bit, but that there still are significant delays, still issues with the chassis,” he said. Since the labor issues were largely resolved, CBP has honored requests for extended gate hours and non-intrusive inspection exams as a way to help reduce the backlog, he said. Those requests need to be “reasonable” because CBP has to deal with budget and resource issues, he said.

CBP has been able to drastically reduce the number of false alarms on radiation portal monitors (RPMs), which also reduces delays on cargo processing, he said. That reduction, which has meant 85 to 90 percent fewer “nuisance alarms,” is due to a newer version of the software that runs the monitors, he said. More effective RPMs make for better and more focused processing, he said. For example, in Los Angeles, where the software was first rolled out, CBP was able to move 24 of 152 officers working on the RPMs to other cargo processing work, said Owen. The agency is also now working with Congress to get funding to refurbish CBP’s non-intrusive inspection trucks that are near the end of the life-cycle, he said.