ACE FTZ Rollout Won't Include Streamlined Air Split Shipment Ability, CBP Official Says

SAN DIEGO -- The rollout of ACE electronic foreign-trade zone capabilities set for Dec. 9 won’t include a comprehensive air split shipment filing mechanism as previously planned, CBP Cargo Security and Controls Director Jim Swanson said during the National Association of Foreign-Trade Zones conference Oct. 23. “It’s going to work exactly the way it is right now,” he said. “Nobody was really ready for it, and it didn’t do quite what we wanted it to do. There were some issues with how it communicated with manifest systems.”

CBP in June said it was planning to allow filers to include all portions of an air split shipment in their cumulative e214s for admissions in a given 24-hour period, before CBP postponed the rollout of ACE e214s from August to December (see 1706140026). CBP has put ACE air split shipment functionality on the back burner to focus on activating the more central aspects of the ACE e214, Swanson said.

CBP still doesn’t have a deadline for the rollout of the second big phase of e214 capabilities, including FTZ partner government agency (PGA) filings, Swanson said. “We are still working on what we need to do to connect PGAs to the e214,” he said. Other areas for e214 phase two include indicators for manufacturing direct delivery and split shipment indicators, Swanson said. “Originally, 214 was kind of cobbled together out of our entry system, in order to get an electronic system up and running, and then we just kind of enhanced it and improved it a little bit.”

CBP should also roll out a currency exchange rate calculator in ACE on Dec. 9, alongside the new e214 capability, Swanson said. Reconciliation and drawback are still on track for a February ACE rollout, and CBP plans to debut a collections functionality “sometime next year,” he said. “Obviously, collections we have to get right…. Really, the biggest problem with collections is the back-end process. We have to get the money right for the auditors.”

Despite the fact that “some of the discussion” surrounding an August Government Accountability Office report (see 1708290024) might have made it appear as if CBP didn’t have a handle on FTZs, Swanson said he was happy with the report’s recommendations. He noted that the agency had been looking at ways to improve its FTZ compliance review process, and that CBP “knew we were behind the curve” on the matter. CBP knew it needed to get more of its ducks in a row to enable a more automated process for FTZ reviews, Swanson said.

CBP has met GAO’s first report recommendation to centrally compile information from FTZ compliance reviews and associated enforcement actions, Swanson said. CBP hopes to do most FTZ reviews remotely, while still doing some visits and communicating to FTZs a checklist of tasks to carry out, he said. Storing compliance checklists had been a challenge for CBP, as some of them run 18-20 pages, and a software application set up to store them crashed within a week of its activation, Swanson said. But CBP is now undertaking and storing two-page compliance summaries of each review, which is working better, he said.