ACE Delay Gives Trade Breathing Room, But Uncertain Path Still Ahead

CBP’s recent delay of some mandatory use dates for the Automated Commercial Environment elicited a sigh of relief from the trade community, but much work remains to ensure a smooth transition, said customs brokers and software developers in recent interviews. The new staged approach, with deadlines in February and July 2016, gives the trade the time it needs to successfully migrate to ACE. However, familiar problems with quota-related entry types and still-unreleased software requirements by CBP and other agencies will remain hurdles to be overcome as ACE implementation continues over the coming year.

Under the new timeline announced by CBP on Aug. 31, the legacy Automated Commercial System will now be shut off on Feb. 28, with all entries and entry summaries required to be filed in ACE on that date, as well as PGA data for the Food and Drug Administration, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and Lacey Act data for the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (see 1509010017). Data from the remaining PGAs with release authority will be required in ACE sometime in July 2016. The October 2016 deadline for all remaining portions of the CBP cargo release process, including protests, drawback and reconciliation, remains in place.

“Christmas in August,” Uwe Sartori of Advanced Transportation Systems, a software developer, said of the changes. “The 60-day clock and counting has turned into a 180-day clock and counting,” he said. “It will still take everything the Trade and CBP has to meet the deadlines," said Sartori. “It’s just now that we have a great shot at success. The November deadline would have been a disaster.”

The trade community now has the “breathing room” it needs to monitor ACE’s smooth implementation, said Gary Ryan, vice president of Airport Brokers. Pointing to a recently updated CBP list of ABI vendors (here), Ryan noted that many software developers are not ready to provide a complete ABI to their customers. And software development is only the first step, said Ryan, who is vice president of the Customs Brokers & International Freight Forwarders Association of Washington State. Customs brokers must then take the software and adapt it to their corporate systems and processes, train their employees, and get their importer clients on board, said Ryan.

Leadership from the Trade Support Network, one of several major industry groups that had called for a delay (see 1506300016), applauded the “appropriate” and “reasonable” decision to delay the ACE mandatory dates. “We were concerned that there was too much that was going to be happening, too soon, with little flexibility,” said Tom Gould, co-chair of the TSN’s Integrated Communications Subcommittee. Although TSN leadership had asked for six additional months in the letter, the four provided with CBP seems to have satisfied software developers dealing with the technical details of ACE development, said Gould, a customs consultant with Sandler Travis. “They’ll be able to program, test and train in that time period.”

Nonetheless, the delay should not be seen by industry as an opportunity to ease work ACE implementation, said Gould. “Just because Customs delayed it doesn’t mean that anybody should push off their transition,” he said. Speaking on behalf of the TSN, Gould encouraged “all filers, brokers, importers, anyone else dealing with Customs automated systems, to be aggressively working through the transition.”

There are still “a lot of technical details to go,” and “a lot of questions that are unanswered,” said Gould. According to a revised deployment schedule (here), CBP still plans to roll out filing of certain entry types that may be subject to quota, including foreign-trade zone and warehouse withdrawals, at the same time it switches off ACS. According to Gould, CBP is concerned that allowing for live filing in both ACS and ACE at the same time could create quota amount counting issues.

Some have voiced concern about the lack of any time for live filing of quota-related before the new system becomes the only method of filing (see 1506030054). The lack of any time for live filing and testing of the quota related entry types was one of the “main issues” for Fany Flores-Pastor, director-R&D compliance systems at Descartes, a software developer. Though Flores-Pastor welcomed the additional time provided by CBP, particular with respect to PGA implementation, she said the decision to push back deployment of quota along with the deadline was “a little disappointing.”

The delay does provide almost four extra months of testing in CBP’s certification environment, noted Flores-Pastor. However, CBP has thus far been unable to get several quota-related entry types successfully up-and-running in the testing environment, she said. Even once these issues are ironed out, certification “is not the same as production,” she said.

The quick turnaround for quota, as well as the current lack of any CATAIR instructions for foreign-trade zone and temporary importation under bond entries, is causing some concern about the February deadline for Cindy Allen, co-chair of the Advisory Committee on Commercial Operations Trade Modernization Committee. “There are always bugs in a new system,” so the trade will keep a close watch on how quota is rolled out “and that it be fully tested as comprehensively as possible," said Allen, who in the past headed CBP's ACE Business Office. The quota environment presents the unique challenge of trying to test without affecting the levels of a live quota, she said. The topic is still “under discussion,” and the trade community will have to “stay tuned,” she said.

Beyond February’s ACS to ACE switchover, the trade community will again face tight timelines as July’s PGA deadlines and overall completion in October approach, said Allen. With PGAs on the horizon in July and reconciliation and drawback required in October, some CATAIR requirements may not come out until next year, leaving less time than desired for implementation, she said. The sooner the trade “can get those CATAIR specifications out and examine them from CBP, I think the better everyone in the trade community is going to feel about what’s going to be required and the changes that are going to be made” to drawback and reconciliation, said Allen.

Continued monitoring by CBP as ACE implementation moves forward is “critical,” said Allen. But another delay in ACE mandatory use dates in unlikely, she said. “I think this is a reasonable timeline,” said Allen. “They have broken it up into essentially large chunks that are still doable for the trade community, and for the PGAs, as long as we continue to work together.”

UPDATE: As of Sept. 10, Trade Support Network has issued two recommendations to CBP that the agency allow live filing of quota and quota-related entry types in the Automated Commercial Environment in advance of CBP’s Feb. 28 mandatory use date (see 509100015).