CBP to Soon Outline New E-Commerce Strategy, Including Assistance for Small Importers

AUSTIN, Texas -- CBP will announce in the “coming weeks” a new strategy to address the recent explosion of e-commerce imports, said Acting CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan at the American Association of Exporters and Importers annual conference on June 21. The new approach will combine engagement and education of the trade community, and in particular small importers, with internal changes that will help ports deal with surging volumes of shipments, he said.

Among other initiatives will be enforcement operations “specifically designed to evaluate the compliance rate in various e-commerce environments,” McAleenan said. A recent five-day interagency operation at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York found a non-compliance rate of 43 percent of packages examined. Though the operation was meant to target imports of illicit fentanyl and other synthetic narcotics from China, and intercepted 5.3 pounds of the potent synthetic opioid, the CBP and its counterparts also found nearly 800 intellectual property rights violations among nearly 1,300 non-compliant shipments, McAleenan said.

CBP’s e-commerce strategy will focus largely on small businesses, which are benefiting from the rapid expansion of e-commerce but “don’t necessarily know about international trade laws and regulations that impact what they can import,” McAleenan said. These companies often lack in-house compliance resources, he said. CBP will conduct outreach to small businesses and provide an “essential repository of information on clearance requirements,” he said.

Internally, CBP will be developing a “toolkit” for internal use of appropriate enforcement actions on violative shipments, McAleenan said. Ports have been “hard-pressed” to keep up with seizing goods that are inadmissible. In combination with the recent increase in the de minimis limit to $800, the rapid rise of e-commerce has caused shipments at some ports to increase by over 500 percent in the last 15 months, overwhelming what was a “perfectly adequate staffing level” before these changes, he said. “Not everything needs to be a full-on seizure, which requires several steps and a significant resource effort,” he said.