NCBFAA Urges 'Soft Compliance' Policy for New NOAA Seafood ACE Requirements

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration should put in place a “soft compliance” policy for its Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) filing requirements when they take effect on Jan. 1, 2018, the National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America said in a letter to the agency citing concerns over trade community readiness. Despite “extensive outreach” by NOAA, customs brokers and their importer clients are having trouble getting the required data from other actors in the supply chain, and there has been insufficient time for testing in ACE, the NCBFAA said in the Dec. 1 letter.

The 10 or more data elements mandated by NOAA’s December 2016 rule, including information on the harvester or producer, the species of fish and where the fish was harvested and landed, are “brand new requirements for the industry and are scattered deep throughout the supply chain,” the letter says. “Even when the U.S. importer is fully aware of his obligations the task at hand is daunting,” it says. “The global seafood supply chain is a very complex network of people and companies that catch, aggregate, process, pack, transport, store and import seafood, making the SIMP electronic filing data especially hard to gather -- particularly when a typical shipment mixes seafood from multiple sources,” the NCBFAA said.

The complicated supply chain has compounded an already difficult environment for customs brokers to test ACE software changes that implement the new requirements, the NCBFAA said. NOAA only began its ACE filing pilot in October (see 1710030044), and only recently have “software providers completed the necessary system programming for brokers,” the trade group said. Many brokers are still “struggling to work out the technical kinks in their systems” and as a result “only around 8 seafood entries” had been filed in ACE as of late November. “To avoid significant disruption in the supply chain, all parties to the transaction must have time to properly design, test and deploy their respective systems,” the letter says.

NOAA "is aware of the concerns expressed in the letter," an agency spokesman said. "We continue to work with trade organizations to support the effective implementation of SIMP while minimizing disruption to seafood imports."

One approach NOAA could take is making “some or all of the new data fields optional for an initial period of time, allowing importers and filers to fully develop a supply chain information infrastructure to ensure the correct information is known and available at the time of entry,” the NCBFAA said. That would allow filers to transmit the data when available, “yet not disrupt the flow of trade when it is not,” it said. NOAA should also expand both the hours and staffing of a help desk the agency plans to set up during the transition. A staff of two answering questions from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time is “not adequate for the complex entry data requirements that NOAA is about the implement,” particularly for filers on the West Coast that will be left “high and dry for almost half of every business day,” the NCBFAA said.