Customs Bill, ACE Mean Busy Times Ahead Likely for CBP's New Head of Regulations and Rulings

The new processes for antidumping and countervailing duty evasion investigations and intellectual property rights protections are likely to be some of the first items addressed by the CBP once customs reauthorization legislation is signed by President Obama, said Alice Kipel, CBP's new executive director of regulations and rulings (ORR), during a Feb. 23 interview. Only about two months into her new job (see 1602120034), Kipel already faces the daunting task of prioritizing some of the biggest changes in the agency's long history. In addition to implementation to the customs bill, Kipel will help oversee the regulatory process for Automated Commercial Environment rules as well as look to improve speeds on customs rulings responses, she said.

Among the group's regulatory responsibilities is to, together with subject matter experts, develop rulemaking notices. "With legislative changes that division can get quite busy," she said. While Kipel declined to get into specifics on the bill's implementation since it wasn't yet signed, she offered some general insights how the agency handle such regulatory overhauls. "As with any piece of legislation, when it comes to a Regulations and Ruling perspective," the work will begin with a close review of the language, she said. From there, CBP lawyers will consider "what we need to do about that language," she said. But "it's too soon talk about what we need to do in point of fact," because from there the processes can "go in a lot of different directions,"

Still, there's some provisions within the bill that are clearly Congressional priorities, such as enforcement of AD/CV orders and IPR, she said. So, if Obama signs the bill, Kipel's office would quickly begin to provide support to the Office of International Trade as it implements the new AD/CV enforcement provisions, she said. Other provisions within the legislation are given a longer timeline, which will also help ORR to prioritize pieces of the bill, she said. The agency has "been there before" with major legislation and Regulations and Rulings is "up to the challenge" of handling such a full docket in coming months, she said.

The speed of customs rulings, a longtime point of contention among customs lawyers and others, is another issue that Kipel said she is following closely. It's worth considering that the rulings from headquarters inherently involve complex issues that typically require careful consideration, said Kipel. "Many of those decisions are not just for the purpose of the requestor but also for the purpose of providing guidance to the trade community," she said. Additionally, many of the ORR attorneys are "charged with other important responsibilities." Still, the agency is monitoring ruling statistics monthly "to explore if there are avenues where we could improve the delivery of service and, in fact, we've taken some measures internally to try and streamline the process that we hope will lead to quicker issuance of rulings," she said. CBP released statistics on its ruling responses for fiscal year 2015 in November (see 1511050004).

Kipel oversees a little over 200 CBP employees, located in New York and Washington, within the office. Currently, "the implementation of ACE is occupying a lot of our time," and that's an area that ORR will continue to be active in, she said. Without providing further detail, Kipel said that work within ORR is continuing on CBP's proposal to eliminate hybrid filing (see 1511100030) as part of the transition to ACE as well as an update to customs broker regulations that saw some delay as focus switched to ACE (see 1511040068).