No Major Changes to ACE PGA Requirements Before February, But Some Fixes Still Necessary, Say Officials

BALTIMORE -- CBP will no longer allow substantial changes to Automated Commercial Environment filing requirements for the three partner government agencies (PGAs) set for full implementation on Feb. 28, said Brenda Smith, CBP assistant commissioner-international trade, at a press conference held Nov. 4 at CBP’s East Coast Trade Symposium. However, the agency may still have to implement fixes for bugs and broken policies, she said. An official from one of those agencies, the Food and Drug Administration, later said changes may still be necessary to correct issues or account for new deployments in ACE that may affect FDA.

The CBP Advisory Committee on Commercial Operations (COAC) recently recommended that CBP put a freeze on PGA business rules, implementation guides, and record layouts in order to give filers time to implement and test PGA programming (see 1510300018). Filing in ACE will be required on Feb. 28 for the Food and Drug Administration, National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration, and Animal Plant Health Inspection Service Lacey Act requirements.

CBP is telling the agencies to try to minimize changes to their filing requirements “as much as possible,” said Smith. If the change is to fix a bug, or an operational policy that’s not working, CBP is probably going to have to make the change. New data requirements or business processes that come out of the blue are probably out. “One of the things that we recognize is there are changes, and there are changes,” said Smith. ”We are encouraging our PGA colleagues to recognize the challenges experienced by the trade to accommodate changes,” she said.”

FDA has heard the trade community’s call to “lock down” its ACE requirements, but is still not at the point where it can completely finalize them, according to remarks from Domenic Veneziano, director of FDA import operations, during a panel at the symposium the next day. Rather, the agency is still working “to determine the process of how to do that in the future,” he said. In the meantime, if there’s an issue that requires change, FDA needs to maintain its flexibility to do so. For example, the agency recently had to modify its supplemental guide due to some clarity issues related to prior notice requirements. Other changes may be necessary as CBP deploys new capabilities in ACE, such as in-bond, which doesn’t impact FDA development-wise but does impact FDA’s data, said Veneziano.

FDA’s ACE filing pilot is now open to all commodities at all ports of entry, said Veneziano. The agency is up to 27 filers, and has processed about 200 entries, mostly of pharmaceuticals but also of food and medical devices, representing approximately 380 lines. One of the big lessons learned from FDA is that many importers are not getting the right information to their brokers, leading to rejected entries.

Meanwhile, NHTSA’s ACE pilot currently has six filers, and while available commodities were limited at first to easy commodities like tired, the pilot has now “moved on to virtually everything” at any port, said Clint Lindsay of the agency’s import and certification division during the Nov. 5 panel discussion. NHTSA has “resisted” making changes to its PGA requirements since the agency published its implementation guide in August 2014, after hearing calls from developers for years to “lock it down” as soon as possible, he said. So far, there have been 13 “minor changes” since then, some driven by the trade community’s testing in CBP’s certification environment, said Lindsay.