CBP Pulls Back on Extensive ABI Client Rep Reshuffle, to Reassign Some Filers on Case-by-Case Basis

CBP will not move forward with plans for a wide-ranging reorganization of its ACE customer support office after receiving negative feedback from the trade community, said Steve Zaccaro, chief of the agency’s Client Representative Branch, on a conference call held Oct. 4. The agency will reassign some software vendors, importers and brokers currently assigned to overburdened client representatives, but the “vast majority” will not be affected by the changes, he said.

Publicly announced at the beginning of August, the initiative would have seen customs brokers and importer self-filers reassigned to the same client representative as their ABI software vendor or service center (see 1808010081). Some ABI vendors and their clients are already organized that way, as are all users of CBP’s manifest systems. But many brokers and importers would have moved to new client reps under the scheme.

“There was a lot of pushback from the trade,” Zaccaro said on the call. After looking at that feedback, CBP acknowledges “that there is a strong rapport with clients and client reps in a lot of cases,” he said. “I feel like there was a lot of fear that we were going to completely eliminate that. That is not the case.” Nor was the plan for CBP to bar direct communication between importers and brokers and their client reps, as had been rumored (see 1807310032). “I don’t think it’s even possible for that to happen.”

Nonetheless, CBP will now move to a less widespread, more case-by-case reorganization. The agency will look at the workloads of individual client representatives, and reassign some software vendors and service centers so they are more evenly distributed. Then, CBP will look at the broker and importer clients and reassign some based on need. “But we are not at this time going to redistribute all of the clients to go with their respective vendors or service centers,” Zaccaro said.

At the same time, CBP will make greater efforts at ensuring that client representatives are only answering the questions they’re supposed to, Zaccaro said. Because the client representatives are so responsive, they often get questions outside of their scope of work. Questions about software should instead be addressed to software vendors and questions about CBP policies to policy offices, for example. CBP will proceed with plans originally discussed in August to develop a frequently asked questions document on where the trade community should address their questions, he said.

CBP also will start updating its error code dictionary, hopefully in October, eliminating a source of confusion that added to the workload of client representatives. The agency on Oct. 1 started work on improving CSMS messages so they are sent out in a more timely manner and with more information on the issues that prompted them, Zaccaro said.

Work on the toned down initiative will begin with in-house discussions at the Client Representative Branch to confirm a tentative list of reshuffles that was developed internally. Then, CBP will begin notifying vendors and service centers if they are moving to a new client representative, followed by ABI self-programmers, Zaccaro said. “Once that’s settled, then we’ll start looking at the clients,” he said. That work should start sometime in November, with brokers and importers seeing “a good portion of the changes that we’re going to make” by the end of 2018, and some changes extending into January.

Any reassigned brokers or importers will be notified by email or phone using the contact information submitted to CBP when the filer signed up for electronic filing. “For the vast majority of clients, you are probably not going to have an impact,” Zaccaro said.